Did a nightingale sing in Westfield Greggs? Well, not exactly. But just 10 minutes’ walk from the Stratford shopping behemoth, the transfixing dancer Aakash Odedra is leaving it all on stage and portraying a songbird’s desperate dying melody, all the more beautiful for its anguish.
The nightingale, or bulbul, is a plangent image of the soul in Sufi myth. Fighting against the dark, it is ultimately released from the body and soars into divinity. A voiceover at the start of the hour-long solo tells us that an artist also dies a little in the course of every performance.
