Picture: Matt Cawrey

When award-winning choreographer Aakash Odedra was 21 years old, he realised he’d been spelling his name incorrectly his whole life, missing out the second ‘a’. The reason? His dyslexia, which he had worked throughout his school years to try and minimise. Years later, however, he would use this same neurodivergence, which Odedra calls a ‘gift’ not a ‘curse’, to create the subject for his 2015 dance piece Murmur. Following that success, Odedra has now adapted it into Little Murmur, a new work that tours with a rotating cast of solo dancers and is showing as part of the Edinburgh International Children’s Festival.

‘You’re always put into special needs groups if you’re dyslexic, or if you don’t fit the mould,’ Odedra says, over Zoom from Mumbai where he’s currently working on a new piece. ‘You’re labelled unintelligent, because there’s a lack of understanding of what dyslexia means.’ Some of the world’s brightest minds, Odedra points out, have been dyslexics: Einstein for one. Searching for a non-verbal metaphor with which to explore a language-based neurodivergence, he homed in on this idea of intelligence, and settled on the image of a starling.

‘They’re very curious (curiosity is a sign of intelligence) and when they fly they form a murmuration,’ Odedra says. ‘There’s this warping of shapes in space.’ With dyslexia, he explains, information is interpreted differently via the visual cortex: ‘letters and objects change their perspectives’. In Little Murmur, he wanted the ‘chaos’ of the starlings’ murmuration (created with flying paper and swirling projections) to echo the creative world of a dyslexic person, which can shapeshift and transform objects. It’s the reason, Odedra says, he can look at, for example, an iron, and instinctively see in it an animated, characterful creature. 

Picture: Matt Cawrey

Little Murmur is Odedra’s first piece for children. His choreographic style merges contemporary dance with classical Kathak, creating a dance language ‘without borders’. As a British Asian speaker of four mother tongues (Hindi, Gujarati, Kathiawari and English), he compares this to that moment when he can’t find the right word in one language, making it feel natural to switch to another.  

For similar reasons, Odedra believes that creativity is inherent in dyslexia. ‘In a school, when you're writing a sentence and you can't spell the word that you need, you’ll find another word that you can spell to compensate for it: that’s being creative.’ Dyslexia, it seems, has always been present in Odedra’s work, even to the extent that feeling like an outsider led him to set up his own company. ‘If you're not going to make allowance for me, I'll make allowances and I'll bring people into my world.’ 

Aakash Odedra Company: Little Murmur, Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh, Thursday 12–Sunday 15 May.