Sitting silently as the Whirling Dervishes performed a religious ceremony was a strange thing to do on a Saturday night. As I sat in the Quick Center audience watching politely, people around me complained about the performance.
“It’s so insufferably boring,” said one female audience member.
There were only a few people who seemed to be enjoying the proceedings. Going by the looks on the other audience members’ faces – and the words flowing from their mouths – those who enjoyed the show were in the minority.
So, what were those other people jabbering for? Probably, the audience expected the Whirling Dervishes to be entertaining, but the Dervishes’ performance wasn’t intended to be fun.
The Dervishes, a Sufi Muslim sect originally from Turkey, came to celebrate their religious ritual of whirling, or the act of spinning, called Sema.
The Dervishes act out the ritual in the belief that science has proven that everything in existence revolves – from planets and solar systems, to protons and electrons – but unconsciously.
The Dervishes also hold, according to the playbill published for the event, that man is the “possessor of minds and intelligence, which distinguishes him from and makes him superior to other beings. Thus the Whirling Dervish … causes the mind to participate in the shared similarity and revolution of all other beings.”
The whole ritual consists of seven parts, which in turn constitute a mixture of music, chants of verses from the Qur’an, and four salutes or “selams” by the dervishes, which are the whirling that gives the religious order and the event their names. The entire ritual is the Dervishes’ submission to God, and they express it through heavy use of symbols, primarily color (for example, the white skirts are the ego’s shrouds).
Even the motions of the dance are metaphorical; the Dervishes whirl in a circular formation, expressing the revolving, reciprocal nature of the universe, and they hold one hand to the sky and one to the ground: the ascending hand receives God’s blessings and the left showers them upon the earth. Simply put, the monks become sacred sprinklers.
The ritual, in its entirety, is beautiful to behold, especially during the order’s graceful, spinning “selams.” The Quick Center’s stage crew enhanced the affair with slick lighting transitions.
However, one has to remember that, when all is said and done, the whirling was a religious ritual, not a Broadway show.
A great deal of audience members seemed to forget that, judging by the chatter and the number of preemptive exits from the theater (and the door slamming that ensued).
While I find I can’t critique Saturday’s event on a “good or bad” scale, I can express my views on the audience’s behavior: immature, narrow-minded and disrespectful.
The bottom line: See the Whirling Dervishes if you want to broaden your horizons. If you want to talk or leave early, go to a movie instead.
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