Julidans: Language of the Birds Reza Mirabi (IR/DE)

How do we still interact with each other?

In 1987, the final song of the now-extinct Moho bird was recorded: a call to a partner that would never answer again. A song sung in emptiness. For creator Reza Mirabi, that sound evoked a memory of a text he learned as a child – Mantiqut-Tayr, or The Conversation of the Birds, a twelfth-century Sufi poem. In it, birds from all over the world gather around a single question: how do we respond to a world that seems to be falling apart?

That question has not become any less urgent since then.

Reza translates this centuries-old allegory into the present in Language of the Birds . It combines choreography for two dancers, Gustavo Ciríaco and Mathilde Bassetti, with live music by Saba Alizadeh on the kamancheh (a Persian string instrument) mixed with electronic and noise elements, music by singer-songwriter Astønne, with percussionist Khaled Abdou, and live storytelling by Sher Doruff.

The birds' search for a leader is intersected by real stories: two sisters counting the remaining birds in Gaza, veterinarians saving thousands of birds of prey in Delhi, a tsunami survivor in the Nicobar Islands who was warned by birds, a dove speaking from the rooftops of Tehran.

The performance seeks no definitive answers and passes no judgment. It opens up space for attention, for listening, for the questions we rarely ask aloud. How do we still meet each other, across distance, difference, and disruption? Those voices together – human and animal, old and new, here and far – form the true language of the performance.