E-Mail This Article to a Friend One world The Rumi Concert comes to town BY BANNING EYRE

Jordan Hall will become a nexus of world music, dance, literature, and social activism this Friday when the Rumi Concert takes the stage. The performance brings together four renowned artists of very different stripes: poet and translator Coleman Barks; cellist David Darling; global percussionist Glen Velez; and dancer and storyteller Zuleikha. At the center of it all will be Barks’s idiosyncratic translations of ecstatic poetry by the 13th-century Afghani poet Jelaluddin Rumi.

By some accounts, Rumi is the most widely read poet in America today, in large part thanks to Barks’s work. The evening’s proceeds will benefit the House of One People (HOOP), an ambitious conference center now being launched in Montague by Zen master Bernie Glassman, who’s best known for creating the ground-breaking community development organization the Greyston Foundation of Yonkers. HOOP will be a place where social activists and visionaries, friends and foes, from around the world can come together to talk, teach, plan, and perform. The bold interaction of disciplines embraced in the Rumi Concert aligns with HOOP’s ambition to break down old boundaries and imagine a better world.

Speaking from her home in New Mexico, Zuleikha describes the performance as "an ancient model in a future package." She was raised in a musical family in Northern California and went on to study classical dance in North India, Bali, and Japan. She knows the art of the whirling dervishes, which is tied to the poetry of Rumi via Sufi mysticism, but her performances now intermingle these elements in a way that reflects her years of work with avant-garde choreographer Anna Halprin. She says this goes for all four performers: all have ties to Sufism and other venerable disciplines, but none wishes to be limited by the boundaries of any existing tradition. Velez’s well-known mastery of diverse percussion styles, particularly those involving frame drums, is one example. "Coleman reads Rumi, I dance, Glen Velez performs the most amazing world percussion, and David Darling plays cello. Everybody is trained in their own right, but then we weave together this completely different thing."

Having collaborated for the past eight years, these artists have developed the group chemistry of a seasoned jazz combo. Some aspects of what they do are scripted, but much is improvised, so each performance has its own mood and character. For Zuleikha, the magic lies in the way everything happens together. "It isn’t a poetry reading; it isn’t a music concert; it isn’t a dance recital. It’s a weaving of story, dance, and music. And Coleman’s translations of Rumi are not archaic. They’re very contemporary. There’s a kind of meter that we are all familiar with from Western poetry. Rumi’s work is timeless, and it’s filled with situations and descriptions of what we all go through internally in our lives." She reads an example over the phone:

Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity?

Why would you refuse to give this joy to anyone?

Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups.

They swim the huge, fluid freedom.

It takes special talent to swim the huge, fluid freedom of all these elements into a coherent performance. But to judge from years of sold-out concerts around the country, the creators of the Rumi Concert manage. Taking a lead from Rumi, who was known for telling funny, even bawdy stories, Zuleikha, who calls herself a "storydancer," includes one or two of her own stories in each performance. At first, she says, arts presenters were unsure how to classify the Rumi Concert. Now, perhaps in a sign that the world is indeed changing, interdisciplinary is in. The trend has opened doors, but Zuleikha steers clear of the I-word. "This isn’t interdisciplinary. It’s using different colors to create a bigger tapestry. It has meaning, and a lot of humor in it. It has a sacred tone, but it’s not religious. That’s what we like."

"The Rumi Concert: A Turning Night of Stars" takes place this Friday, October 8, at 8 p.m. at Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street in Boston. Tickets are $25 to $75; call (617) 585-1260, or visit www.ticketweb.com