Hello friends. I hope you are well, and hold you in my thoughts and prayers for your health and well being.
I met Noor-un-Nisa last week. It was at the performance of her one play, “Aède of the Ocean and Land,” presented live, on Zoom. Here are some impressions, for those of you who missed it. I am very aware of the limitations of my understanding of the play, and of the performance, but thought you would still want to hear something about it. Perhaps a few of you who attended would add some helpful comments.
The play is a rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus, a leader and hero of the Trojan War, is delayed for years on his return home to Ithaca to reunite with his kingdom and family. To Rome he was known as Ulysses, and here he is called Ulys. His famous journey home includes Cyclops, sirens, sorceresses. The first half of the play is clearly the same story, freely retold. Once he gets home, however, a surprising twist, shocking really, turns the story inside out.
An Aède is a wandering minstrel, like Homer, say. When first back home, Ulys is disguised as an Aède to check out the situation incognito.
For a description of the play, here’s a piece from the back cover of the book:
Until now…Noor’s mystical drama “Aède of the Ocean and Land” has remained virtually unknown. A fantastical creation, “Aède” shines a revealing light on Noor’s life and thought, reflecting her unique assimilation of the spiritual teachings of her father, Hazrat Inayat Khan. In “Aède,” Noor combines elements of Greek myth, Sufi esotericism, and personal experience to produce a gripping and surprising retelling of the “Odyssey” of Homer. The protagonist wrestles with monsters, colloquizes with nymphs, and sails the Mediterranean in search of home. Will Ulys reattain domestic bliss in Ithaca–or does another destiny await him?
For weeks beforehand I was intrigued and excited by the very concept of a live performance on Zoom, with actors and musicians in five different countries. And I was truly amazed at how well it worked. I’m a great fan of drama and opera streamed on TV, with the stage setting and the addition of captioning, pause and rewind. This was different, excpt it did have the captioning.
Here’s how it worked. We set our screens so that we did not see the non-video participants, ie, the audience, and only saw 3 or 4 thumbnails of the performers on the screen. Often we saw two images of actors and a third of artwork representing the background. Maybe another thumbnail showed a God or Goddess. Actors were careful to speak one at a time, and not to use music that had to be timed to a singer, so the time lapse was not significant. Because this play has no essential group action, Zoom worked just fine.
The performance had so much music and singing that it could be considered an operetta. The acting was fantastic, with Ulys outstanding in his major role. I found some of the music very dissonant or atonal in style and not to my taste. It reminded me of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, if you’re familiar with that. Some of the artwork used as background struck me as surrealistic, and I was often wondering what it represented, even the second time I saw it. I hope one of you with more sophisticated tastes will comment.
After the performance, we had a chance to make some comments. Pir Zia pointed out two of the major themes of the play. One was the opening of the heart through the pain of life. The other, the basic conflict between joy and peace, joy requiring involvement in life while peace requires indifference and independence.
The Inayatiyya publicity also gave helpful clues for interpretation.
A Zoom Live Music-Cinema Event: Noor reimagines Homer’s epic. The journey of Ulys in Aède is an allegory representing Noor’s father, the Indian mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan’s, spiritual journey in the West, while the seven acts and the structure of Aède recall the seven valleys traversed by the birds in Farid Attar’s medieval Sufi classic “ The Conference of the Birds. ”
The connection to those seven valleys was very subtle, hard to notice even after Bawa explains it in detail in his written introduction. I was impressed that Bawa caught it and actually wonder if she had to point it out to him herself. You believe in that, right?
The acting was absolutely fantastic. Dashon Burton played Ulys with a rich and warm bass baritone singing voice. It was directed by Elli Papakonstantinou in Athens, with the music by Shirish Korde. Tarana Jobin was the producer. In their comments afterwards, it was said that Elli had the amazing concept, Tarana made it happen. Clearly lots of people made lots of major contributions.
Here’s what meant so much to me. The first half, Ulys’s journey, showed Noor at her imaginative, magical, playful best. She loved her characters, and we loved them, and we loved her. Though I know the books, the movie, the Jataka Tales, the songs and dance and portrait, I hadn’t really met her before like this.
The second half was clearly a metaphor about Noor and her father, represented by Ulys and his son Telemachus. In his disguise as an Aède, Ulys sings Murshid’s song, " Befool not, O night." The son, conveniently played by a woman as if to remind us of Noor, sings her song to the Majzub, now addressed to the Aède.
I’ve often thought about this. In his four years living at Fazal Manzil, Murshid was gone much of the time. He would go to England, Italy, Germany, Holland for a month at a time. He took two trips to the US, once for three months and once, in 1926, for seven months. After that last trip, when Noor was twelve, he immediately spent the summer with the summer school and then left for India, without his family and without explanation, where he soon died. So much traveling, an Aède telling his story and singing his song all over Europe and the US. And so much waiting, in Suresne, and perhaps 14 years in the play
So here we have Noor exploring, wrestling with, who he was, what his relationship to his family was, and her own relationship with him, fully aware of his greatness and missing him as a father, written ten or twelve years after his death, in her mid-twenties. So we can join in her emotions and contemplations.
And we hear her voice, always poetic, always imaginative, sometimes playfully Homeric, sometimes in a style so like her father’s that it wasn’t always clear when she was quoting him. Bawa gives this example:
Aphrodite’s declaration, “Great be the storm and the battle, Love shall always lead the way,” recalls Hazrat Inayat Khan’s words in the Nirtan , “Great the battle in life, Truth in the end shall win.” p. xix
How poignant were the questions Noor seemed to be asking. Why was he gone so much? Why did he leave us to go to India? How can I learn to accept this? What would I have wanted to happen?
These questions were as moving as her answers. The play challenged us to ask the same questions. And I found her answers not meant to be clear. In the last act I’m not quite sure if they are still on earth, or in heaven. Maybe she’s thinking of being in India with him. Maybe they are on an “earth turned into heaven.”
In seeing a live performance of the play on Zoom, we witnessed the invention of an ingenious and innovative new art form, or perhaps a new genre. I thought of Hamilton, or the Civil War documentaries. The potential is enormous. It’s not the same as the old forms, of course. These performers were not amateurs, but imagine the future possibilities, say, for amateur theater.
Most important to me: The chance to sit in contemplation in Noor’s presence.
The heart wherein thou [Love] shinest, thou givest extreme joy and deep pain, but the heart where thou hast not penetrated hath neither joy nor pain. - Act 5, Scene 1
With love and blessings to you all,
Jami
Washington, DC