Anoushka Shankar Curates A Celebration Of Indian Art And Performance

Anoushka Shankar, the Grammy-nominated renowned sitar virtuoso and composer, has taken the helm as Guest Director for the Brighton Festival 2025, bringing a rich tapestry of Indian art and performance to the forefront of this year’s program. Her curation is themed around New Dawn and the program of diverse performances and artistic collaborations illuminates notions of transformation, renewal, and the interconnectedness of cultures.

Brighton Festival is England’s largest annual curated multi-arts festival and the 2025 edition features an eclectic multi-arts line-up curated by Shankar as a rallying cry for a more hopeful future. We are living through an era defined by conflict and unrest around the world, yet Shankar’s theme of New Dawn invites performers at the festival to send a message of hope for our collective ability to heal and recover.

Shankar’s New Dawn festival program features seven world premieres including Wembley, written by Nikesh Shukla (The Good Immigrant) Nikesh Patel (Starstruck) and Himesh Patel (Yesterday) in the aftermath of the 2024 riots and a riveting programme of South Asian music, dance and performance including Meera Syal, Aakash Odedra, Aditya Prakash, Aruna Sairam and Arooj Aftab.

Other highlights of the festival include evim [my home]. Ceyda Tanc is a Turkish-British choreographer who has presented two world premieres at Brighton Festival this year. Starring an all-female cast, Tanc’s work explores the interplay between Turkish folk dance and contemporary UK culture. Tanc collaborated with childhood friend Natasha Granger to create evim as a magical interactive dance theatre piece for 0-5 year olds and their families.

I was fortunate enough to witness Aakash Odedra’s unforgettable dance performance Songs of the Bulbul at the Festival, which completely blew me away with his phenomenal energy and spirit. Songs of the Bulbul is a perfect fit for Shankar’s theme of New Dawn and at its centre is a passionate dance performance that unfolds like poetry in motion. A moving meditation on life, death, and rebirth, it is at once deeply personal and universally resonant—an ode to Odedra’s late mother, tenderly expressed through the character of a Bulbul (Persian for Songbird).

Nightingales, or Bulbuls, are revered in Persian culture where their song represents a spiritual seeker looking for union with the divine. Aakash Odedra collaborated with choreographer Rani Khanam and musician Rushil Ranjan on Songs of the Bulbul, which is inspired by the ancient Sufi myth of a bulbul captured and held in captivity. The performance follows the experience of a Songbird–played by Odedra–who was bound ever closer and slowly died from a broken heart, emitting one last song before expiring. Odedra’s magical performance tells the tale of beauty born out of loss and the freedom that can be found only through the ultimate sacrifice. The musical, dance and poetic traditions of Sufism are at the heart of this compelling new theatrical experience created by two of the world’s leading Sufi Kathak artists. Odedra’s epic dance performance combines the physicality of Kathak with the spiritual journey of Sufism on a quest to seeking unity with the Divine.

Odedra inhabits this songbird with astonishing physicality, his fluid, soaring movements capturing both fragility and resilience. The performance is powerful and life-affirming, filled with visceral emotion that transcends the stage and invites the audience into a dreamlike realm. Beguiling and profound, Songs of the Bulbul is a rare work of dance that not only tells a story but also touches the soul.

Odedra takes the audience on a mystical journey with his utterly mesmerising dance performance which emits so many emotions without any words. In Songs of the Bulbul, Odedra delivers a profoundly evocative performance and offers the audience an immersive experience steeped in grief, love, and spiritual transcendence. This new work is a deeply personal tribute to Odedra’s late mother Kay—who he describes as his “smiling bulbul who left her cage.” Through an eloquent fusion of movement and music, Odedra explores the fragile, soaring life of a songbird, using it as a metaphor for death, liberation, and the cyclical nature of existence.

There is some reference in Odedra’s performance to Whirling Dervishes of the Sufi order, who are known for their unique practice of whirling as part of religious ritual Sama. Also called Sufi whirling, the dance is a form of physical meditation and a way for dervishes to connect with God. Odedra takes the spirit of the Whirling Dervish and adapts it into a thoroughly contemporary dance performance which he puts his heart and soul into.

From the moment he steps onto the stage, Odedra becomes the bulbul. His body channels both the anguish and the beauty of a creature caught between worlds. Every glide, every turn of his hand, pulses with emotion. His kathak-infused movements—rooted in the classical Sufi tradition—are not mere technical displays, but living, breathing expressions of longing, resistance, and ultimate surrender. At times he seems almost weightless, caught in a dance that feels like prayer; at others, his body twists in raw anguish, echoing the pain of loss and the yearning for transcendence.

The performance is notable for its absence of spoken word. Yet in that silence, a story of immense depth unfolds—one of life, death, and eventual rebirth. Odedra guides the audience through these spiritual and emotional realms with the grace of a seasoned storyteller. The music, rich with Indian classical and devotional tones, acts as a second voice—an aural current upon which Odedra’s movements sail. The rhythm of the tabla, the lament of string instruments, and the undercurrent of poetic chant form a symphony of sacred mourning and quiet hope.

There is a meditative stillness to Songs of the Bulbul, a quality that invites reflection. It may well draw inspiration from The Conference of the Birds, the 12th-century Sufi parable by Attar of Nishapur, where birds journey in search of the mythical Simurgh, only to discover that the divine truth lies within. The Conference of the Birds is a poem about sufism, the doctrine propounded by the mystics of Islam. In Songs of the Bulbul, Odedra’s songbird seems to travel through despair toward a luminous inner peace—an embrace of death not as an end, but a beginning.

Ultimately, Songs of the Bulbul is not just a performance—it is a ritual, a requiem, and a rebirth. Odedra has crafted a work that is both deeply personal and universally resonant, rooted in cultural tradition yet unbound by geography or language. It is a stirring reminder that through art, we can give voice to the unspeakable, and in movement, find meaning beyond words.

A highlight of the festival promises to be Anoushka Shankar’s performance of Chapter III– the culmination of her recent trilogy of mini-albums: Chapter I: Forever, For Now, Chapter II: How Dark it is Before Dawnand Chapter III: We Return to Light with a visionary new live show–on Sunday 25th May at Brighton Dome.