I Want Burning

By Tresca Weinstein, *Sharing a Sufi mystic's message* - Albany Times Union - Albany, NY, USA
Thursday, October 15, 2009

In the time it took him to drive from Woodstock to New York City, Peter Rogen's life was permanently changed.

He credits the transformation to a CD he heard for the first time on that fateful journey three years ago. Called "I Want Burning," it features the poet and translator Coleman Barks reading the verses of the 13th-century poet and Sufi mystic Jelaluddin Rumi.

"It's a 90-minute drive from the Kingston exit to the George Washington Bridge, and it seemed like a good opportunity to put the CD in," Rogen said, speaking by phone recently from his home in Woodstock. "By the time I got to the George Washington Bridge, I was a different person."

Barks' husky, Southern-inflected voice speaking Rumi's passionate words catalyzed an epiphany for Rogen, coalescing multiple parallel tracks in his life and work.

A former actor -- he spent two years performing with the Helen Hayes Equity Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music -- he went on to a successful 25-year career as an international business consultant, specializing in communications.

Before and after his retirement a decade ago, he studied Asian and Middle Eastern arts and culture and explored various spiritual paths, always drawn to communication in all its forms, he said.

"I Want Burning," and a reading by Barks that he attended soon after, moved Rogen so deeply that he began organizing his own recitations of Rumi's work, drawing on his many years of "reciting Shakespeare in the shower."

"It was a manifestation and a demonstration of love and compassion and tolerance and art and poetry," he declared in a resonant, mellifluous voice. "It was all in one. It felt as if life had prepared me for this."

"A Celebration of Rumi," a free performance featuring Rogen's recitation, will be on stage at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the University at Albany's Performing Arts Center. Rogen will be joined by the New York City-based composer, vocalist and musician Amir Alan Vahab, who performs spiritual and folk songs from Persia and Turkey, and by dancers who will perform the traditional Sufi whirling meditation.

The event is the result of an evolution that began with a series of informal readings at Rogen's home; he bribed friends with Indian dinners, he said, and then recited Rumi to them. These gatherings spawned his presentations at colleges, including Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson and Florida International University. (Rogen spends half the year in Miami.)

In Florida, Rogen was introduced to Faruk Hemdem, current head of the Mevlevi Order of Sufis and the 22nd-generation great-grandson of Rumi. The two discussed the whirling dervish dancers the Mevlevi Order is best-known for, and agreed that a performance incorporating poetry as well as whirling would give audiences a better understanding of the connections between the two.

According to legend, said Vahab, who grew up in a Sufi family in Iran, as many as a thousand people would congregate at Rumi's home to hear him speak; since his house could not accommodate them all, he put up a tent. His first whirling meditations were practiced while turning round the giant tent pole.

"Rumi's poetry is all about love," Rogen explained. "It's all about the relationship between the human being and God, the lover and the beloved. In a nonreligious model, it's about getting in touch with your deepest or highest part. The whirling is both symbolic of the growth of love as well as a practice to experience that love."

A 2008 performance, in which Rogen was accompanied by 16 Turkish musicians and whirling dervishes, filled every one of the 1,400 seats in the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., Rogen said. He also brought the production to the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Rogen hopes his readings -- some 75 since that life-changing drive -- not only educate audiences about Rumi and Sufism but also fill a hole in American culture.

"Something is missing for the soul when poetry isn't read aloud," he said.

"A Celebration of Rumi"
Where: University at Albany Performing Arts Center, 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday
Tickets: Free, but a ticket is required for admission
Info: 442-3997 or http://www.albany.edu/pac

Pictures (left to right, clockwise): Hafizullah will perform; Arsalaan will provide musical accompaniment on the Turkish nay flute; Amir Alan Vahab will recite Rumi and provide musical accompaniment. Photos: University at Albany.