Glassblower by Da Vida

Some of us were lucky enough to see Da Vida perform last Saturday after Ruminations, a powerful mix of music and visual arts.

Drawing on musical influences from around the globe, with strains of the urban and psychedelic, Da Vida explore the spaces between recognised categories of political, social and spiritual realities.

Words and rhythm combine with electronic and acoustic textures to confront the distinctions between order and disorder, male and female, the mask and the face.

See Da Vida’s take on Rumi’s poetry, lyrics below the video:

It is the rule with drunkards to fall upon each other,
to quarrel, become violent, and make a scene.
The lover is even worse than a drunkard.
I will tell you what love is: to enter a mine of gold.
And what is that gold?

The lover is a king above all kings,
unafraid of death, not at all interested in a golden crown.
The dervish has a pearl concealed under his patched cloak.
Why should he go begging door to door?

Last night that moon came along,
drunk, dropping clothes in the street.
“Get up,” I told my heart, “Give the soul a glass of wine.
The moment has come to join the nightingale in the garden,
to taste sugar with the soul-parrot.”

I have fallen, with my heart shattered ―
where else but on your path? And I
broke your bowl, drunk, my idol, so drunk,
don’t let me be harmed, take my hand.

A new rule, a new law has been born:
break all the glasses and fall toward the glassblower.

[Divan-i Shams 1861, Love is a Stranger: Selected Lyric Poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi, tr. by Kabir Helminski]