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WHIRLING DERVISH-5
nihal kececi
ORIGINAL
ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
36"X48"
For the whirling dervishes of Konya, Turkey, ecstasy derives from discipline. They performed a sema, the Sufi ritual of spiritual rebirth, before a sold-out house on Friday night at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. It was a spectacle: six men dressed in white with tall camel-hair hats, with arms outstretched and long skirts twirling, accompanied by music that slowly gathered momentum, from stately extended melodies to more vigorous, more rhythmic tunes.
The white costumes represent death shrouds; the hats, tombstones. In the mystical Islam that was taught by Jalal ad-Din Rumi, sometimes known as Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273), the spinning dancers are a link between earthly existence and rapturous divine love. There was no chaos, no abandon in their ecstasy. As they whirled, the dervishes proceeded in a circle around the stage, comparable to orbiting planets, while their dancing master strolled among them. They never lost direction, collided or showed dizziness when they stopped for ceremonial bows. Yet unlike twirling ballet dancers, they moved their heads along with their bodies.
Like other mystical rituals, the sema is geared not to pleasing an audience but to creating a precise mental state for the participants. Yet it has an austere beauty, from the geometric figures of the dancers to the music's chain of melodies. The Western touch on the program, on the verge of New Age schlock, was a recitation of Rumi poetry in English, accompanied by two neys (reed flutes) in overlapping improvisations.
Before the sema, the program included a set of spiritual music by the Mevlevi Ensemble of the Mevlana Culture and Art Foundation, which also accompanied the dervishes. Eight musicians -- on neys, kemanche (fiddle), kanun (zither), tanbur (lute), oud and drums -- played largely in unison; six singers joined them, sometimes in call and response. The music moved in graceful arcs, shifting meter and mode, pausing for solo improvisations, speeding up and growing more robust, eventually with grunts as well as drumming to spur the singers. The drummer Kani Karaca began chanting from the Koran in a voice filled with the authority of tradition: rising in long, billowing curves, shifting from open tones to a hooded, otherworldly timbre with hints of overtone singing. As the music inexorably sped up, a lone dervish walked onto the stage and began whirling slowly, using the music as a gateway to devotion.
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