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The language of the Birds
Written, designed and directed by Dr. Patricia O'Donovan.
Based on the Sufi poem: " The Conference of the Birds" by the Iranian poet Farid ud-Din Attar. Other sources were the story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges: "The Aleph", and texts on Arab calligraphy.
In 2007 I gave a workshop on the basic techniques of manipulation and performance of Shadow Theater at the Theater Department of HUJI , which the students had to apply in a stage production.
I chose a religious philosophical poem in prose by the Iranian poet Farid ud-Din Attar " The Conference of the Birds" for the workshop because it deals with the journey of the human soul and uses frequently symbols of light and shadows. The poem deals with Sufism and the way of the Sufi but for our work in class I reinterpreted it to become the journey of the creative mind. There are obstacles to overcome and a need for sincerity and courage to reach a state of harmony with oneself and one's work. In this sense creativity is one of the soul journeys dealt with not only in Sufism but the aims of major philosophical systems.
In my reinterpretation the idea that generated the concept for the design was that the writing itself of the poem became visualized as birds. The image of the circle of light in which all the letters appear came both from the alif module of the Arab alphabet and the circle in which the Universe is seen in the story The Aleph by J.L. Borges.
A writer dreams a story.
The story is about the strength one needs to find in oneself in order to accomplish a hard but desired task. In the story this quest is represented by birds in search for their King .The hoopoe is the inner motor of creation that leads the birds ahead. The birds are thus not individuals but the writer's creative mind.
The birds' journey is a visualization of the process of artistic creation. As such they are not individuals or allegories of individuals but the workings of the artist's mind. Finding the King means reaching the fulfilling moment of finishing one's work, of reaching one's goal.
The writer is woken up by his dream. The story therefore is left without an end.
The birds are desperate because they feel lost at the end, in a new place and no visible King.The writer is desperate and lost because he is in a place with no visible end. This new place is the passage from the screen to the room, a passage from two to three dimensions. It is actually the moment when ideas become a coherent whole. The birds and writer share now the same space.
the hoopoe tells the birds that it is written who is their King. Birds read and discover that the writer is the King.
The writer is in the middle of a brilliant circle of light, the birds dissolve back into letters.
The letters of the Arab alphabet became the basis for making the bird-puppets .I developed a special technique for the puppets in order to keep the letters clearly recognizable. Soon a story by Borges 'The Aleph" became involved and as for today my concept for the play is as follows:
The play is about the realization of one's own creative power, of a search within. On stage is a writer. It is Farid Attar creating his poem about the birds, which are symbols of the human soul. Actors with puppets are the ideas in his mind and one sees the poem in shadows as it is being written/ dreamed/ created by the writer. The King that the birds in the poem search for turns out to be the writer himself. Attar is like the Alif, the first letter of the Arab alphabet, the letter that generates all the other letters, the pen that generates the text. The birds re dissolve into letters when they find their King and thus become immortal: in him they can be reborn again and again in new texts.
New ways of acting and moving on stage are demanded especially since students function both as actors and as puppeteers. I use movable sources of light, and the materials both for props and puppets belong to the world of writing: letters, paper, ink, brushes…
Read here about the alif moduleActor enters with a lamp and a wooden box. He sits down, lights the lamp , opens the box and takes out his writing implements .Holds up a brush
When I was (age?)…I was given this pen by my father. It is made of 24 hairs of a donkey he told me. It made me laugh…24? I imagined a man counting hairs...one….. Two….22…23…24…Why not 25? No! He said….exactly 24! I'll show you why.
Actor spreads out a sheet of paper.
and grabbing my hand made me dip the pen in the inkpot. We will start with the first letter: the alif, make a dot!
Actor shows in actions what he is talking about.
Now make 9 dots one on top of the other. The dot tells you the width of the alif and the nine dots the height of the alif. And now we make a circle whose diameter is the length of the alif. See the circle?
The Alif marks the height of the text and the circle contains all the letters of the alphabet. These 3 elements, said my father, the dot , the alif and the circle determine the proportions of the text.
He then taught me how to write all the other
28 letters
See? They each have a head and a body and a tail……
And they always stay inside the circle?
He laughed, no! No! When you write they come out of the circle, as many as you want …….
I loved the idea of spinning the alif and creating a circle from which an infinite number of letters came out. Everything I saw and thought about was there. Every story I was told was there. I was at once in one place and everywhere, the circle was nine dots in diameter and yet contained the whole universe. It contained all the books I wanted to write…
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