Cover Image: Surrounded by candles and scattered red rose petals, the dancer raises their hands in a moment of stillness. Photo by Angela Grabowska.

Songs of the Bulbul – Aakash Odedra Company
His Majesty’s Theatre
Perth Festival, 14 February 2026

It felt particularly moving to see Aakash Odedra Company’s 2024 work Songs of the Bulbul on the same day as demonstrations took place around the world to demand regime change in Iran.

A solo for the UK-based company’s internationally celebrated artistic director Aakash Odedra, Songs of the Bulbul explores the idea that we can transcend the boundaries of the physical world to find freedom. 

In keeping with his company’s aims, the work draws together multiple cultural threads, blending Persian culture and Sufi mythology with the classical Indian dance form Kathak and a score that melds classical Indian and Western orchestral music with Islamic poetry. 

Anyone who has read the program notes knows that Songs of the Bulbul is based on the Persian belief that the song of the bulbul (nightingale) represents “a yearning for the divine”, and the poignant and heartbreaking Sufi tale of a captive bulbul whose song becomes increasingly beautiful as despair takes it closer to death. The voiceover at the start of the work, however, reveals detail that saw Saturday night’s audience gasp at its brutality.

Knowing this conclusion at the outset, it is hard to imagine that this work will be uplifting. And yet… somehow it is.

In part that is credit to the interplay between dance, music and design. Choreographer Rani Khanam is central to the work’s success, supported by costume designer Kanika Thakur. We see Odedra’s full white skirt inflated by his whirling body, an animated sail that seems to have a choreography of its own, elevated further by Rushil Ranjan’s soundscape of soaring orchestral strings and choral vocals. 

Into the musical mix Ranjan brings the unmistakable rhythms of kathak; the almost melodic tones of the tabla, voices chanting and the sweetness of the sitar converse with Odedra’s circling arms, quick-stamping feet, intricately curlicuing hands and bird-like glances. Flickering fingers are echoed by fluttering red rose petals that are swept up by movement or by unseen breezes. 

In contrast the cries of vocalist Abi Sampa, joined by Sarthak Kalyani, feel somehow both spare and rich, mirrored by designer Fabiana Piccioli’s shafts of light which hint at the impending imprisonment of the bulbul.

We know this idyll must end and yet it is still a shock when it does. As the bulbul, Odedra’s airy quality becomes grounded, his stamps no longer feel joyful but desperate. An erratically strobing light captures fleeting stills of the oceanic ripples of his skirt as he continues to whirl in vain. 

And yet even in the work’s second half, in which we witness the bulbul’s incarceration, torture and eventual death, there is a sense of hope, represented most powerfully through set designer Emanuele Salamanca’s collection of candles, strewn across one side of the stage. Seemingly at Odedra’s command, they flare with warmth that is echoed in the score’s swelling strings, punctuated with hopeful bell-like notes. The work’s final image, in which we watch the bulbul’s smoky last breath disperse, feels like an evocation of the idea that its death is both a tragedy and a bid for freedom.

There is no doubting that this work is confronting and, with its Persian references, feels particularly so at this moment in time. In the artist talk that followed Saturday night’s performance Odedra spoke compellingly about the idea that at times of great pain, we have a choice to become immersed in the darkness, or to move through the darkness to find light. 

Ultimately it feels like we, the audience of this work, have the choice to be uplifted by its light – be it personal, global or both. 

Filled with the richness and warmth of Odedra’s own spirituality, Songs of the Bulbul is a gift to those lucky enough to see it.

Songs of the Bulbul closes 15 February 2026.