Language of the Birds

In 1987 werd het laatste gezang opgenomen van de inmiddels uitgestorven Moho-vogel: een roep naar een partner die nooit meer zou antwoorden. Een lied gezongen in leegte. Voor maker Reza Mirabi riep dat geluid een herinnering op aan een tekst die hij als kind leerde kennen – Mantiq ut-Tayr, of De samenspraak van de vogels, een twaalfde-eeuws soefi-gedicht. Daarin komen vogels van over de hele wereld samen rond één vraag: hoe reageren we op een wereld die uit elkaar lijkt te vallen?

Die vraag is sindsdien niet minder urgent geworden.

Mirabi vertaalt deze eeuwenoude allegorie naar het heden in Language of the Birds. Het combineert choreografie voor twee dansers, Gustavo Ciríaco en Mathilde Bassetti, met livemuziek van Saba Alizadeh op de kamancheh (een Perzisch snaarinstrument) wordt vermengd met elektronische en noise-elementen, muziek van singer-songwriter Astønne, met percussionist Khaled Abdou, en live storytelling door Sher Doruff.
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De zoektocht van de vogels naar een leider wordt doorkruist door echte verhalen: twee zussen die in Gaza de vogels tellen die nog over zijn, dierenartsen die in Delhi duizenden roofvogels redden, een tsunami-overlevende op de Nicobaren die door vogels werd gewaarschuwd, een duif die spreekt vanaf de daken van Teheran.

De voorstelling zoekt geen definitieve antwoorden en velt geen oordeel. Ze opent ruimte voor aandacht, voor luisteren, voor de vragen die we zelden hardop stellen. Hoe ontmoeten we elkaar nog, over afstand, verschil en ontwrichting heen? Die stemmen samen – mens en dier, oud en nieuw, hier en ver – vormen de eigenlijke taal van de voorstelling.

Dit project zou niet mogelijk zijn geweest zonder de genereuze steun van AFK, Frascati Theater en Julidans Festival.

"This piece has been in the dreaming for more than three years.
And now we arrive here together, with soft hearts and trembling fingers.

It began with a poem by the 12th-century Sufi mystic Attar of Nishapur, written in what is now Iran: منطق الطیر, Mantiq ut-Tayr (The Conference of the Birds). Nearly 900 years ago, Attar took the phrase منطق الطیر (language of the Birds) from the Qur’an and began his poem from a world coming apart at the seems.

A world where all the birds respond by coming together to ask: what do we do now?

I have known this poem since childhood, when my parents told it to me and I had a picture book version at home. Three years ago, I encountered it again in a quite weird way, and it landed in me completely differently. It has not left me ever since. It became an important companion on my journey through these last few very intense years.

I realised that its questions, written in the 12th century, are absolutely the questions of our time. Yet it approaches them through poetry and spiritual perspective, (rather than through political language, activism, or critical theory,) so often underestimated paradigms.

In the poem, the birds realise that they need to go on a journey together that leads them to sense that what they are seeking is actually already within them, in their togetherness and collective form. A shift of perspective. A certain receptivity to other worlds that has been lost with time.

Across times and cosmologies, the language of the birds has stirred the imagination as a hidden script, a secret carried in sound, a code of relation between the seen and unseen.

This project follows its historic traces, not to decode it, but to listen for what it might open in us now.

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With people I love deeply, we came to feel Attar’s poem as a call to gather inside the fractures of the present and to reimagine it as a myth for our time. Together with Saba Alizadeh, Astrønne, Sher Doruff, Gustavo Ciríaco, Matilde Bassetti, Khaled Abdou, Lauriane Daphne Carl, Jethro Cooke, ro.heinrich and Siavash Naghshbandi, we enter an impossible attempt to sense what the language of the birds might stir in us in a time marked by insurmountable violence, grief, dislocation, and loss.

It feels deeply urgent today, when so many solutions are framed through force, aggression, war, enemies, or the promise of a future technology. Modes of finding solutions that live, as in Bayo Akomolafe’s words, in the same logic as the problem itself.

Through choreography, live music, bilingual storytelling, animation, film, and poetics, the work brings ancient cosmologies into relation with contemporary stories from Gaza, New Delhi, Tehran, Amsterdam, and the Nicobar Islands.

At its heart lies a question: how do we respond as the world we know breaks apart?

Birds, the keepers of the sky, become our guides into invisible worlds. We listen to their flight, murmuration, migration, and vulnerability. We feel their delight in flight, and yet also their trauma, their resistance, and their despair.

As our worlds are collapsing in front of our eyes, how can we still move toward shared acts of world-making?

A humble attempt to move within another paradigm: love as an impossible practice, collaboration instead of competition, and a deep listening to what is already here but to which we do not seem to be perceptive.

Overcoming fear.

Being here.

In total despair, we meet."

Concept, tekst & regie Reza Mirabi

Co‑creatie, geluidscompositie & performance Saba Alizadeh

Geluidscompositie & performance Astrønne, Khaled Abdou

Choreografie & performance Gustavo Ciríaco, Matilde Bassetti

Tekst & performance Sher Doruff

-|-Creatief geluids‑ & lichtontwerp Jethro Cooke

Installatie Lauriane Daphne Carl

Video ro.heinrich, Siavash Naghshbandi

Mede mogelijk gemaakt door AFK, Frascati Theater, Julidans