Choreographer Wendy Jehlen, a Somerville native who grew up in a multi-cultural family, created dance troupe ANIKAYA to break down boundaries between people. Movement is her language—a language where audience and performers connect through the same breath, heart rate and emotion. The name “Anikaya” is a portmanteau of an (Hebrew for “grace” or “gift”); I (“of” in Persian); and kaya (“body” in Sanskrit).
This month, the troupe stages “Conference of the Birds” at Harvard Square’s Arrow Street Arts, featuring dancers from around the world. The performance is inspired by the 12th-century allegorical work by Persian poet Farid Ud din Attar: In it, a flock of different birds are led on a spiritual quest to find their mythical king, the simurgh. What they discover gets at the heart of the universal search for truth and identity.
I talked to Jehlen, a CJP arts and culture grantee, about dance as a primal form of expression and connection, and about the ancient poem’s modern resonance.
What is it about choreography that moves you, literally and figuratively?
I have no memory before dancing. I did theater for a long time, but I found that I was always cast in movement roles. I’ve always just been a dancer; it’s who I am and my orientation, rather than just a career.
Dance is a really direct way to communicate with people beyond language, and therefore beyond differences. The effect of moving bodies, emotions portrayed through the body, stories portrayed through the body—those have a different neurological reaction than any other art form.
I think I get it. But could you say, in your own words, what it means?
When we bring language into the picture, there are other things happening neurologically that switch on our analytical thinking, as opposed to direct emotional thinking. When we’re watching dance, our brains experience it as if we’re doing it. That’s mirror neurons. There are all kinds of things that happen when people watch dance: Your heartbeats, breathing and brain waves sync up. All of that induces a state that’s open to empathy. This is neuroscience, but it’s also knowledge that dancers have had for millennia.
The tagline for your troupe is “dance diplomacy.” What does that mean?
It’s using dance to bring people together who might imagine that they have differences. With conflicts, people might imagine differences that aren’t there. I also do a lot of work with public diplomacy. I have a couple of projects that have been supported by the State Department, such as the “Run Like a Girl” project, which is about dismantling ideas about gender. Rather than empowering women and girls, it’s recognizing that the traits that we normally associate with women and girls are actually better for society, so we should all be like girls. Rather than saying that girls can be as tough and as strong as boys, it’s about boys being as empathetic as girls. That’s much easier when people are moving to get their brains supple and ready to think differently.
“Conference of the Birds” has also been supported with public diplomacy funding to do workshops. We’re going to have two workshops on the Sundays of this performance, and they’re open for any bodies. It’s all pedestrian movement: walking, running, standing, looking. It’s all about what you’re able to do.
Beyond the movement workshop, what should audience members expect? Tell us about the premise.
“The Conference of the Birds” is a 12th-century poem from Iran, written by the Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar. It’s a retelling of an older story, but in Attar’s version, the birds of the world are called together by the hoopoe to convince them to go on a quest to find their God, their leader figure, the simurgh, a pre-Islamic mythological bird. The birds all come together, and they’re discussing and arguing. Each of the birds gives an excuse for why they can’t go: They’re attached to this, or they’re attached to that. They have all their reasons—all the reasons that humans have for not doing things.
He convinces a certain number of them to go on this journey together. They go through seven valleys, and each of the valleys is a state of spiritual development: the valley of the quest, the valley of love, the valley of insight into mystery, the valley of detachment, the valley of unity and the valley of bewilderment—and, finally, the valley of nothingness.
Throughout this journey, they are becoming a flock, reaching a point where their idea of themselves as separate from other birds disappears. In the valley of nothingness, they experience themselves as connected. That is the ultimate goal of most mystical traditions: to realize the interconnectedness of all things. People name it different things in different traditions. They finally reach the place where they’re expecting to find the simurgh. There’s nothing there except a reflective surface, and they see themselves all together: Their feathers have fallen off. They are completely beaten and exhausted. And that is the divine. They see themselves in the mirror reflected back as the simurgh.
It’s a trope that you find in a lot of stories: What you’re looking for is within you. The divine is not in a set of people that are similar to each other. It’s in the vast expanse of humanity, or bird-ness. And it’s not in our best shape, not when we’re feeling good and happy and refreshed—it’s when we are completely beaten, all of us experiencing this together, that is divine. We, collectively, are the divine.
Why did you choose this particular poem? What about it struck you?
Collectivism is my native language; the idea of the collective in which everyone is different. I grew up in Somerville, which is an immigrant city. The heart has always been immigrants. I’m also bicultural. I’m half Jewish, and the half that’s Jewish is also immigrants. The concept of people being the same was never really comfortable to me. My mom’s family is from Texas, and my dad’s family, which is the Jewish side, is from Poland by way of France. You’re never half anything. You’re wholly two things.
Is there a Jewish angle to this performance?
I know there are a lot of different kinds of Jewishness, and I definitely feel like my understanding and my upbringing were about diaspora and migration. In that way, the whole story really feels like that. The poet, Attar, was killed in a genocide. That, to me, feels very connected.
What do you hope people take away from this? How do you want audiences to leave feeling?
There are many catharsis or individual moments that people can come away with. Overall, I think one of the dancers in our very first residency summed up the point: It’s asking the question of how we can be different together.
At no point do the birds become the same. They just become one, made up of a lot of different things. And that’s what people are. It’s really nice to be different together; it feels really good and satisfying and safe. I feel like people could stand to know that right now.
“Conference of the Birds” runs from Feb. 27 to March 9. Get tickets.
