Aminikia’s 836M Project Ends with Performance

Yesterday evening at the 836M Gallery, Sahba Aminikia concluded his tenure as composer-in-residence by presenting the first of two performances of the project he developed during that residency. The title of that project was The Language of the Birds, and it involved a multimedia adaptation of an epic poem by the twelfth-century mystic Attar of Nishapur. Those of my generation that follow theatrical productions on a global scale probably recall that, roughly half a century ago, Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière collaborated on staging this narrative, presenting it under the title La Conférence des oiseaux (the conference of the birds).

My wife and I were fortunate enough to see this play when its “road show” took it to Singapore. We did not want to miss it, since we had been blown away by that pair’s staging of their previous nine-hour (three-evening) production, The Mahabharata. While this latter was, necessarily, of epic proportions, Conférence amounted to a straightforward account of a journey through seven valleys with almost minimal embellishment.

Last night Aminikia swung the pendulum in the opposite direction, developing a “rich media” approach to set Zara Houshmand’s translation of the poem’s text. This included an array of projections created by Media Artist John Sanborn, music by The Living Earth Show duo of guitarist Travis Andrews with Andy Meyerson on percussion, joined by multi-instrumentalist David Coulter and Aminikia at the piano, and vocal performances by soloist Marjan Vahdat and singers from the San Francisco Girl’s Chorus led by Valérie Sainte-Agathe. While these days texts are projected during vocal performances, last night, due to the unique physical layout of the production, they were available only through downloads to cell phones, which tended to work at cross-purposes to the overall flow of the narrative.

This was clearly the other side of the pendulum-swing from the Brook-Carrière approach. Nevertheless, in experiencing the full scope of Aminikia’s vision, I found to hard to ignore the old joke, “Nothing succeeds like excess!” That original journey through seven valleys turned into a one-thing-after-another structure, which left me with little sense of enlightenment, even if each episode clearly had its own virtues. Perhaps what was required was less diversity in resources and more distillation in content.