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Akram Khan: A Fierce Energy Derived from Stillness written by Philip Szporer
In a world moving so fast, stillness is often presented as antithetical to speed. With Akram Khan, his fierce spins, angled gestures, and the sublime articulation of hands, fingers and feet and his moments of soft repose astonish and enthrall. His dancing displays an enigmatic beauty, but the key to the puzzle lies in the energy and inspiration he draws from his source. Immersion in contemporary dance would follow, but Khan is schooled in the 500-year old northern-Indian classical dance form called kathak. Muslim invaders of India adopted this Hindu temple ritual in the tenth century, and these rulers were looking for forms of entertainment in their courts to better correspond with their more secular tastes. The name derives from kathakar, the traditional storytellers or bards who, taking from both the Hindu and Islamic narratives, recited the sagas of contemporary heroes and commented upon current events and recounted the lore of Hindu mythology. Kathak male solo artists danced, sang, and narrated these tales of the gods’ and goddesses’ exploits. The sophisticated court dance expressed power through its pirouettes, intricate patterns, and technical virtuosity, particularly displayed in lightning footwork and turns, and remarkable feats with ankle bells. While kathak is narrative, Khan himself was more influenced by the abstract aspect of the dance, gathering its powerful energy into the structure of his work, leading him to dance with “ex-
Akram Khan photo by Rankin
©
T lay arc B ne Irvi
“Vertical Road” photo by Laurent Ziegler
treme speeds of chaos.” Born in 1974 in “the melting pot” of Balhum, in South London, to Bangladeshi parents, Khan has described himself as an “energetic, volatile kid”. Because he needed to be occupied, his culturallyinclined mother pushed him into studying Bengali folk dancing at the age of three at London’s Academy of Indian Dance. Then, when he was seven, he trained under the tutelage of the renowned British-based kathak guru Sri Pratap Pawar. Khan became the master’s prodigy. In that environment, he couldn’t question authority, and later admitted the practice became “claustrophobic” and “the pressure… suffocating”. Between those sessions of immersion, he grew up like most children of his generation watching Tom and Jerry cartoons, but seeing Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” transformed him, recognizing in the singer-dancer an artist who was a man of colour. Khan initially made a name for himself in the theatre world as a young boy of 10 touring in The Adventures of Mowgli. With his virtuosi abilities, he was cast at 14 in Peter Brook’s the Mahabharata, the stage play of the epic poem. With Brook, he learned
Akram Khan Company
“Vertical Road”
October 10, 2012 at 8pm www.akramkhancompany.net
IRVINE
BARCLA Y THEATRE
www.thebarclay.org
to go to the source and eliminate the extraneous. Later, he entered a university degree program to assuage his parents. Though rather than enroll in law or medicine, he embarked on his first full immersion into the world of Western contemporary dance, throwing up flares not only for his parents but his kathak master as well. He “ran away”, he says, ultimately studying at De Montfort University, then at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds. Arriving early for his audition, he viewed, by chance, videos of the Brit-
IRVINEBARCLAYPRESENTS the 2012-13 International Contemporary Dance Series
“Vertical Road” photo by Laurent Ziegler
ish physical theatre company DV8 and Pina Bausch, and it wasn’t so much that he liked what he saw, but he watched intently, feeling “the poetry in the violence”. Following graduation, Khan worked with mentor Jonathan Burrows and won a coveted place on the X-Group project organized by PARTS, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Brussels-based school, expanding his toolkit. In August 2000 at the age of 25, he launched his own company. Since he has been stimulating audiences and critics alike with what he calls “contemporary kathak”, a unique movement language integrating kathak and contemporary dance principles, creating something altogether new. Mastery of the kathak forms posed challenges for Khan to fully integrate the shapes, dynamics, and structures of western dance into his body. Similarly when he returned to his kathak teacher, the changes that modern dance was having on his dancing were unmistakable. He recalls his body was getting “confused”, and he admits to his own frustration, and certainly an awareness of the annoyance of his teachers. Khan began to investigate how the rhythms, speed and expressiveness of gesture and the intricacies of kathak footwork could be articulated with the more full-bodied nature of modern dance. Khan, and audiences everywhere who see his work, continues to be fascinated in the ways traditional and new modes of music and movement can interact with their own organic structure and poetry.
His kathak training also provided him the ability to play the mathematics of his own dancing against the time cycles of his musicians, as such having the freedom to master the mathematics of the structures – what the Guardian newspaper calls Khan’s “fiendish mathematics of rhythm and footwork”. One of the UK’s meteoric dance talents, Khan, currently an associate artist at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, insists that he isn’t interested in being pigeonholed into a multi-cultural box. And while hybrid invention is very much part of his own innate practice, he is adamant he “was never inspired by fusion”, which he perceives as being too passive an approach. Creative impulses prompt his immersion in many facets of the dance world and beyond. As such, he can claim a distinguished list of collaborators, including his long-standing composer Nitin Sawhney, a former member of the British sketch show, Goodness, Gracious Me, Turner Prize-winning sculptor and artist Anish Kapoor, lighting designer Michael Hulls, playwright Hanif Kureishi, the Belgian choreographic sensation Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, sculptor Antony Gormley (also a Turner Prize-winner), worldrenowned ballerina Sylvie Guillem, and actor Juliette Binoche. The poetic universe of Vertical Road is inspired by the work of Rumi, the great Persian poet and iconic figure of Sufism. The piece, a reflective, metaphysical dance evoking spirituality, mortality, and transcendence, and seen through the
journey of a traveler, transcends cultural difference and religion. The title concretely speaks to the “clock time” of Western, “horizontal” culture, says Khan. In this work, he transports spectators through a more “seasonal, feminine time”, summoning an expansive Eastern view of human existence and ritual. Khan’s mastery is his capacity to reach out to other nationalities, other cultures. He’s fascinated by storytelling, especially mythology, and how it differs with people from different cultural backgrounds. Learning about other cultures, he commented in Dance Magazine, is ultimately learning about yourself. He tries to find the common denominator, “the moments when we realize that we are separated by education but so similar.” Art, at least on Khan’s stage, brings down the barriers of cultural difference and religion, he’s said. His priority is to have art and life intermingle in the gathering place of the theater. That’s represented in his multinational company of dancers chosen for their individual qualities and not their ethnic profiles, he told The Los Angeles Times. “Allowing people of different cultural backgrounds to come together is the way of the world. Something new and contemporary will always result from such an experiment.” Philip Szporer is a Montreal-based lecturer, writer and filmmaker.
IRVINEBARCLAYPRESENTS the 2012-13 International Contemporary Dance Series