A couple of Augusts ago, word began to spread among dance fans about an unmissable show. Aakash Odedra was already an established choreographer (in 2017 he won the Fringe’s Amnesty Freedom Of Expression Award for #JeSuis) but 2022 marked his Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) debut, with Samsara becoming that year’s dance phenomenon. A duet between Odedra and Chinese dancer Hu Shenyuan, it demonstrated extraordinary scope and intense chemistry. It was nothing short of breathtaking. 

Two years on, Odedra is back at EIF, this time with a very different piece. Does Samsara feel like a hard act to follow? ‘I hadn’t really thought about it until your question,’ he says, looking slightly pensive over Zoom. He is currently backstage at the Trecastagni Town Theater in Sicily, rehearsing his new piece, Songs Of The Bulbul. ‘Maybe naturally, there will be a comparison to Samsara, but that was a very different type of production. This is me doing a solo for 50 minutes.’

One might think that physical feat would heap even more pressure onto Odedra. But in fact, he says, he’s been relishing the creation of this new work more than he usually does. ‘I don’t normally enjoy the process at all. It’s like a car crash happens and you have to kind of pull out the wreckage and put it together and create a Rolls Royce.’

This time it’s different, however, because he’s working alongside a choreographer he has revered for some time, kathak master Rani Khanam. ‘Her knowledge is vast, like an ocean,’ says Odedra. ‘It’s like dropping a lotus seed in a pool of water (the water being her knowledge and the seed being me), and I feel like it’s just helping me germinate again. I feel like she really understands me and the body.’

The bulbul of the title is a bird which features in ancient Sufi myths, often paired alongside the symbol of a rose. In the tale Odedra is retelling, the bulbul dwells in remote, inaccessible mountains, singing a song ‘so powerful and so beautiful that it’s priceless if you are to capture this bird’. When caged, he explains, its song is made even more beautiful through its melancholy. 

This might sound cruel in the real world, but in metaphorical terms it speaks to the notion of meetha dard, which translates from Hindi as ‘sweet pain’. It’s an allegory, says Odedra, for the experience of being an artist. ‘There is a direct parallel to our lives and the life on stage,’ he insists. ‘You sing, you dance, you give, and every time you perform, you die a little. You give a part of your soul to the audience. You refine, refine, refine until in the end you leave this body, your cage. There’s nothing left to give because you’ve given everything.’

In more personal terms, the tale also resonates with Odedra’s own journey through dance. ‘It’s a story of an isolated individual. And in many ways, I think it’s my story and Rani’s story. I think we both feel the same things about life. And I suppose that’s why we dance. And that’s why we keep dancing.’

Songs Of The Bulbul, Lyceum Theatre, run ended.