KARACHI: In Pakistan’s restless commercial capital, where thousands arrive each year to work, rebuild, and reinvent themselves, a centuries-old Sufi allegory found new breath and movement on stage.
At the World Culture Festival this week, global theatre ensemble ANIKAYA performed “Conference of the Birds,” transforming the Arts Council of Pakistan into a living reflection of the city itself: searching, fragmented, striving, and endlessly becoming.
Directed by American choreographer Wendy Jehlen, the multi-media movement performance reimagined Farid ud-Din Attar’s 12th-century Persian epic, where a flock of birds journeys to find their divine king, the Simorgh, only to discover that the truth they seek lives within themselves.
Karachi, home to migrants from every province, every language, every story, mirrored the allegory. Like Attar’s birds, many here carry maps of places left behind, hopes folded into suitcases, and dreams stitched into survival.
“This journey began in 1991 when I was at Brown University,” Jehlen told Pakistan TV Digital after the performance. “It was when I first encountered Conference of the Birds and the poets and ideas that shaped my entire life.”
The production was performed by dancers from Benin, Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, South Africa, Japan, Palestine, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United States.
Though drawn from different homelands, their bodies moved as one organism, separate rhythms, shared breath, evoking the poem’s central revelation: unity is not sameness, but harmony across difference.
Jehlen explained that the work evolves with each place it is performed.
“Everywhere we go, the story changes,” she said. “The people, the air, the land, they shape how the birds fly.”
For Jehlen, movement itself is a philosophy.
“Movement is my language, but it’s also a human and animal language, the most direct way to access empathy,” she said. “Through physical theatre, you don’t just understand a story, you feel it.”
The performance drew deeply from real experiences of refugees and migrants, echoing the emotional terrain of Karachi: longing, uprooting, resilience.
“We are on this journey together, whether we like it or not,” Jehlen added.
“Each imperfect, each necessary. Unity exists only through difference.”
Bringing the performance to Pakistan, she noted, felt like returning the story to one of its spiritual homelands.
“I liked doing it here because people in Pakistan already know Conference of the Birds,” she said. “They’ve studied it, they understand it.”
The show concluded to a standing ovation. Fluid, fierce, wordless storytelling that needed no translation.
As the audience rose, one truth hovered softly, like a final wingbeat:
Karachi, too, is a flock in motion, wandering, weary, hopeful, still searching for the Simorgh it carries within itself.
