There is a movement form very close to Greece, across the waters of the Mediterranean in the land of modern day Turkey, which is a noble part of antiquity and which has faced sweeping changes in last century. Pressures from nationalistic, touristic, and other special interests particular to modernity have shaped and re-shaped this ancient form dramatically. This is the sema ritual of the whirling dervish.

Theater and dance practitioners have been inspired by the whirling dervish since the nineteenth century, when many Europeans traveled to Turkey and witnessed the whirling dervishes there. As part of the wave of spiritual and occult interest that blossomed at the end of the nineteenth century and through the twentieth century, ideas from Sufism began to penetrate the discourses of both esoteric and performance schools in Europe. Practitioners such as Jerzy Grotowski in the United States, and Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman in Europe included forms of whirling and ideas from Sufism in their training methods.

This researcher, like practitioners from the early twentieth century, has sought to open avenues of embodied awareness in her dancers via whirling practice. Whirling itself, as a powerful performance form, has become prominent in her own work. A growing network of semazen-performers have been producing and touring ritual whirling as public performance extensively in the last two decades. This presentation presents perspectives of the modern Sufi initiate, who negotiates issues of ownership, authenticity, function, and form through and with the act of performance. At once political, socially responsive, and aesthetic, the whirling sema is also uniquely spiritual and devotional, opening up questions of religious importance through the East–West interchanges of its practitioners, initiates, and performers.