Through Kathak, Sufi music, and exquisite staging, Songs of the Bulbul channels grief, devotion, and ecstasy. This performance lingers long after the final note. The nightingale’s cry becomes both myth and meditation on the artist’s life.
Hello everyone! I’m back to writing after a long hiatus. I moved countries, and the busy life of motherhood pushed my writing to the backseat. Last night, I returned not just to writing, but to experiencing art in its most visceral form. I attended the opening night of Songs of the Bulbul, performed by Aakash Odedra at the Perth Festival. As we entered His Majesty’s Theatre, the strains of Ganj‑e‑Shakar, a devotional Sufi song in praise of Hazrat Baba Farid, played as house music. Its gentle, reverent hum instantly drew us into the world of the performance, setting the stage for the Sufi myth at its heart.
In Sufi literature, the bulbul, the nightingale, is never just a bird. In the words of Rumi, Hafiz, and Attar, it becomes the human soul, restless and incandescent with longing. Opposite it blooms the rose, radiant, unattainable, a symbol of the Divine.
The bulbul sings, in ache and ecstasy, devotion fierce enough to pierce and consume. Its song trembles between rapture and grief. It yearns to transcend the self and return to what was never truly separate.
In Odedra’s performance, the nightingale’s eyes are gouged out, it cries, a sound suspended between grief and devotion. The myth transforms into a meditation on the artist’s life: giving everything in each act of creation, leaving pieces behind. Creation becomes both loss and offering, a language that carries beyond the body, the moment, and the eyes that no longer see.
The dance begins at the edge of becoming. Odedra’s body curls, searching, holding itself in quiet tension. Slowly, he unfurls, tasting the vastness of the sky. Freedom emerges in subtle gestures, shifts of weight, turns, leaps, and precise Kathak footwork. Flight gives way to constraint as space tightens, echoing the passage of time and the narrowing of life. His spiraling body evokes the whirling dervishes, filling the expansive stage.
Rose petals drift and swirl as he glides, leaps, and spins, tracing the bulbul’s longing. In the final moments, candles flicker and gauze drifts onto the stage. Odedra lifts and sweeps the fabric, flowing with the light. Through the interplay of gauze, glow, and petals, the soul seems to rise; weightless, luminous, meeting the Divine.
Odedra is a striking dancer, his movements imbued with rare fluidity. His dance seamlessly blends the precision of Kathak with contemporary expression, creating a language of motion that is both technically breathtaking and profoundly emotive. The choreography, crafted by the acclaimed Rani Khanam, a master of the Lucknow gharana style of Kathak, draws deeply from Islamic and Sufi texts. She weaves tradition and imagination into every gesture, layering each movement with devotion, philosophy, and subtle beauty.
Music by Rushil Ranjan lifts the performance to another level. Sound and silence exist in equal measure, reverberating in the body long after notes fade. The qawwali Allahu Allahu Allahu pulses like a heartbeat, a call to presence beyond fear and noise. In a tense, fractured world, its repetition offers solace, insistence, and devotion.
Lighting designer Fabiana Piccioli bathes the stage in shifting shadows and gentle glows, sculpting space and mood so that every movement, rose petal, and flicker of gauze feels suspended in a luminous, almost otherworldly atmosphere.
Catch Songs of the Bulbul at the Perth Festival from February 13–15, 2026, and let yourself be carried into another world.
Songs of The Bulbul
NatyaLoka 