Did a nightingale sing in Westfield Greggs? Well, not exactly. But just 10 minutes’ walk from the Stratford shopping behemoth, the transfixing dancer Aakash Odedra is leaving it all on stage and portraying a songbird’s desperate dying melody, all the more beautiful for its anguish.
The nightingale, or bulbul, is a plangent image of the soul in Sufi myth. Fighting against the dark, it is ultimately released from the body and soars into divinity. A voiceover at the start of the hour-long solo tells us that an artist also dies a little in the course of every performance.
Must a dance on spiritual themes feel coolly abstract or introspective? Not here. This piece laughs at tame and shakes its skirts at subtle. The plush score and scenography, as well as Odedra’s dancing, prefer a plane of palpitating fervour. The recorded melodies by composer Rushil Ranjan have a tumultuous, cinematic energy. With chords crashing and vocals soaring, not to mention livid blood-red petals tumbling from above, it feels like a finale erupts every five minutes.
Odedra, who has just been named an associate artist at Sadler’s Wells, is an exceptional performer. Here’s he’s like a lightning bolt, dazzling in the dark. Odedra is acclaimed in the Indian classical form of kathak, where much of the excitement comes from exactitude – razor-sharp fingers, rhythmic feet. Those precision thrills are here in Odedra’s performance and Rani Khanam’s choreography – but wedded to a full-blooded sweep and swirl.
Odedra’s bulbul is the anguished cousin to Pavlova’s dying swan – we even get the swimming travel and rippling arms, while his fingers twitch like fiercely articulated feathers. Dressed in white with red around the cuffs, like blood falling on snow, Odedra alternates bambi leaps, a boneless shuttle and dizzying spins that change direction in a blink. Gradually, what looks like freedom, claiming the space with wild turns, comes to seem increasingly like struggle, wings beating against the bars of a cage. Odedra dances his heart out, with ecstatic, tormented abandon.
Rows of candles curl beside the stage, like an arm cradling the space, and Fabiana Piccioli’s exquisite lighting design moves into a golden glow or backlit mystery. As Wicked teaches us, defying gravity can only be achieved for so long. The more frantic Odedra becomes, the faster his fingers chops the air, the more his feet threaten to carve grooves in the floor. Yet more crimson petals fall. The candles fade, the race is run. A fabulous last exhalation and the songbird falls silent again.
Sadler’s Wells East, to July 19; sadlerswells.com
