Conference of the Birds: Choreographer Wendy Jehlen describes artists as dreaming possibilities for society

ANIKAYA's Conference of the Birds with an accompanying talkback was the first installment in the Religion and Public Life series “Arts and the Moral Imagination." Conference of the Birds is a multimedia physical theater work by ANIKAYA Dance Theater, inspired by the 12th century poem of Farid Ud din Attar. It embodies stories gathered from modern-day refugees and other migrants. The narratives symbolize the journey that we, the diversity that is humanity, take together. It is a story of found community, of the necessity of difference.

Speaking to Christina Williams, MTS ’26, choreographer and Artistic Director for ANIKAYA, Wendy Jehlen, shared her thoughts on dreaming in the artist's work of imagining a more moral future for society. Watch a segment from ANIKAYA's "Conference of the Birds" below.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:

CHRISTINA WILLIAMS: Wendy, I'm very happy to have you here. I know that you're going to be doing an event called Conference of the Birds. The title of the event really interested me, so I just wanted to know why is it called that?

WENDY JEHLEN: That's really easy. It's the title of a poem from 12th-century Iran by Atar, which is one of the most interpreted texts that we know of in human history.

CW: And what do you think people will experience at the event?

WJ: Hopefully they will be transformed. They will experience a multimedia extravaganza with a projected character. So the lead character in "Conference of the Birds" is the hoopoe, which is a real bird that we don't have in the Americas, but it exists in a lot of the world, and it's very important in many different traditions, including Islam. That character is the convener of the birds and in our version that character is played by a projection that is constantly transforming. And so, that is through different screens, and it lives all over the space. And then there's immersive music that was created by three different composers with the collaboration of many, many, many more artists from really all over the world. The ensemble is also made up of dancers from a similar swath of the world, all the continents except Australia and Antarctica.

CW: And what do you want people to gain from the experience and what is the main theme?

WJ: I think there are many things that you can gain from the experience. The story is an epic. And it's one of these epics where there are a lot of smaller stories told within that. So I think there are many poignant, really specific stories that can resonate with people. We've taken the structure of "Conference of the Birds" and the story of "Conference of the Birds" and replaced all of those little stories with more modern stories of migration. So there are a lot of those stories that will resonate, a lot of emotions that will resonate. But the sort of overarching question was, I think, best expressed by one of the dancers, Luciane Ramos from Brazil, who, in our very first residency, she said that in this piece we're asking the question, "How can we be different together?" And I think that is always the question all of the times. So getting a vision of what that feels like to be different together.

CW: That's beautiful. And then finally, I wanted to ask, how does this event fit into John Paul Luderick's framework of the moral imagination?

WJ: I'm reminded when thinking about that of a study at MIT on dreaming. And they were looking at mice and how they learn to go through a maze. And what they saw was a mouse could go through various mazes during different days and they would look at the brain activity to sort of see what they're thinking. And then when the mice were asleep, they would dream combinations of those experiences. And so they were figuring out how to go through this maze by putting together their various failed attempts in dreams. I'm sure that dreams have many, many different functions, but that is one of the really important functions of dreams is to see different possibilities by combining things that would not have been combined in real life or hadn't been yet. What artists do and what we do as a collective is the same thing. We do that for you. So we do that for society. We take different ideas, and we put them together in a new way and present those as a dream, as a possibility. And so to me, that's also the same concept of moral imagination. Artists imagine for us.

CW: Thank you so much.

WJ: My pleasure.