Whirling and dancing

If you’ve watched the Bedtime Story video and thought the guys doing the spinning dance are amazing, there’s a chance to see it for real in London this month. The Whirling Dervishes of Konya are performing at the Royal Festival Hall on the 20th & 21st. Their devotional dancing is a spiritual and poetic celebration of love and life.

As well as using the Dervish imagery in her video for Bedtime Story, Madonna has also performed the poetry that inspires the dance in “Bittersweet“. The words are taken from the works of Rumi, who is one of the important spiritual masters of Sufism, an interpretation of Islam. It is Sufism and the way of Rumi that inspires the Whirling Dervishes, their dance a meditation on love. Here is an extract from Bittersweet:

In my hallucination
I saw my beloved’s flower garden
In my vertigo, in my dizziness
In my drunken haze
Whirling and dancing like a spinning wheel

I saw myself as the source of existence
I was there in the beginning
And I was the spirit of love
Now I am sober
There is only the hangover
And the memory of love
And only the sorrow

You can read more on the dance and its meaning at: http://www.whirlingdervishes.org/whirlingdervishes.htm

Thanks to our Team Member Daniel