‘I Always Find Pleasure In Drowning,’ says Akram Khan

IN dance, the body is the instrument. What happens when that body starts to disobey? When it refuses to jump as high or brise as eloquently or land with the lightest of taps? Most dancers would adapt to a ‘diminished’ body, perhaps they’d choose to focus more on expression rather than movement. They’d restrict their sphere and limit their exu­berance on stage. But 49-year-old Akram Khan is not a man of half measures. English dancer and choreographer of Bangladeshi descent, Khan is one of the most original and celebrated choreog­raphers of international dance. Over the last two decades, London-based Khan with Mavin Khoo, his creative associate, has created a body of work that straddles contemporary and Kathak and by dissolving the boundaries between both has created something altogether new and vital.

On June 24 and 25, Khan bid farewell to full-length solo dance performances with sold-out shows at The National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai. Some of India’s best-known dancers such as Malavika Sarukkai, Aditi Mangaldas and Anita Ratnam were in attendance for Khan’s final performance of Xenos, which had its world premiere at the Onassis Cul­tural Centre, Athens in 2018. The attendance of the dance fraternity hardly surprises, as Khan is known for being an “instinctive and natural col­laborator.” He has in the past collaborated with a wide range of artists and organisations, from the National Ballet of China to actor Juliette Binoche to singer Kylie Minogue to artist Anish Kapoor to writer Hanif Kureishi, to name just a handful. Xenos ended with a lengthy standing ovation at NCPA with many of the dance fraternity, who he considers friends and mentors, chanting, “Bravo”.

Khan describes his body, all sinew and muscle, as “less of a dancer’s body and more of an athletic body”. This body has now started to say “No”. Over the last five-ten years the body and ego have had a face-off, with the body slowly gaining the upper hand. “It feels like a child,” says Khan, “At first your child listens to you, silently in the beginning, and then it starts complaining and then it starts rebelling. My body is going through that teenage phase. Where it is saying, ‘Fuck you, I’m not going to do what you want.’” While re­specting senior dancers who continue to dance, Khan feels physically that as a father he cannot now afford to spend three hours a day training, even if he loves it.

Khan had planned to retire from full-length work with Xenos in April 2020. But the pandemic derailed those goals. For the last three years he has been training four hours a day for just these final shows.

He had always planned to do his last shows in India because Indian dance is where he found his identity and what initiated his jour­ney. Khan’s jugalbandi of Kathak and contem­porary can be explained by the multiple influences in his life, from Michael Jackson as a child, to Charlie Chaplin and Bruce Lee to Muhammad Ali. He says, “These were my heroes, but so was Krishna.” He would watch all the Indian dancers who came to London to perform, from Kumudini Lakhia to Pandit Birju Maharaj. He adds, “As you get older, you start to discover where your real home is. By that I mean, where do you want to be buried? So where do I want to bury the Kathak? And when I say bury it, I don’t mean end it. It depends on how you perceive death. It is the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. The moment I bury it in the earth of India, a new chapter will begin in India for me.”

To keep up with the demands on his choreography, he will stop doing full-length work. He will continue to do cameo roles, he says, “Because I need to feel the stage. I can’t ask someone to bleed for me, if I don’t know what it feels to bleed on stage myself.” He enjoys the daily practice of dance, but he also feels the need to be pushed and to push his dancers out of their comfort zones. He explains, “As an artist you have to find pleasure in drowning. Otherwise, the day I’m in the studio and I’m repeating myself, that is the day I should stop creating.” To find a medium where he was a beginner again, he em­barked upon Brazilian jiu jitsu. During the lockdown he trained six hours a day in this mixed martial art.

Xenos was commissioned by 14-18 NOW, a UK-based arts programme for the First World War’s centenary, and in it Khan gives voice to the oft-forgotten colonial soldier. While carrying a mes­sage, like all of Khan’s work, the politics never overpowers the form.

Speaking from Athens, and a few weeks before his India show, Khan is as precise with words as he is with his footwork. He describes Xenos as both a “classical” and a “folk” piece, where the “Classical belongs to the gods. You’re having a conversation with god. With folk, you’re having a conversation with each other, with Earth.”

Xenos opens with a short classical Kathak concert, where Khan syncs and jives perfectly with the two musicians on stage. This section is especially targeted at a Western audience as those who come to see him, in London or Greece, are unlikely to attend a classical Indian concert. Starting with a Kathak recital for him was a “very political move and an important move,” as Xenos is his tribute to the 1.5 million Indians who fought in World War 1.

The seed of Xenos dates back to news articles in 2016-17 that detailed the con­tribution of colonial soldiers to World War 1. Khan, the son of a Bangladeshi restaurant owner father, and a mother who was a teacher, had never studied these accounts in school. He says, “I wanted to use this piece to give voice to the many colonial soldiers who died and fought in the First World War and were never recognised for it.”

Khan’s subaltern lens on history, his desire to examine the past from the per­spective of the tiger and not the hunter, is evident in his other works as well. Jungle Book Reimagined, which premiered last year, is told from the vantage point of today’s children. In Until the Lions (2016) an adaptation of poet Karthika Nair’s book Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, we see the epic through the tale of Amba, the princess abducted on her wedding day, who then invokes the gods to seek revenge.

Khan’s insistence on questioning the ‘his’ of ‘history’ comes from his own upbringing. During our hour-long interview, Khan, a father of three chil­dren himself, repeatedly mentions his mother and her deep influence on his work and intellect. He makes clear that as a “strong feminist mother” she was unlike other feminists, because “she’s not a talker, she’s a doer.”

What she did was manifold. She helped Bangladeshi women in their neighbourhood in London to come out of their homes. Surrounded by men who were working in Indian restau­rants these women spent their time cooking at home and raising children. Mita encouraged them to organise performances and to have “ownership of their own identity”. While empow­ering the community’s women, as a literature specialist, she also taught Khan the myths and mythology from Greek to Hindu to Chinese to African. He recounts being perplexed in uni­versity when his version of the stories seemed to differ from the textbook tales. From his mother he had heard the Mahabharata from Gandhari and Draupadi’s perspective. He knew the story of Adam and Eve, from Eve’s eyes. He says, “My mother told me myths are written predominantly by men, so they will never recorrect themselves. It will never give you the real context. It will give you part context.” From her he learned to question the established narrative and to seek out his own.

Khan’s dance and choreography are both very physical and dramatic. With his world-class team of light and set designers, the stage transforms from a dance durbar to a battlefield with effortless ease. The music rises to crescendos and melts into a single drumbeat. While Xenos is a quintessen­tial solo performance, it becomes spec­tacular through its musicians—Nina Harries (double bass and vocals), BC Manjunath (percussions and konnakol), Tamar Osborn (baritone saxophone), Aditya Prakash (vocals), Fra Rustumji (violin). The music spans different genres from Hindustani to Carnatic to Western classical.

Xenos opens with Khan as a Kathak soloist in a durbar. But with a flick of the hand, with a clutch of his face, he becomes a shell-shocked soldier. The props of the durbar—chairs and cushions—are suddenly towed away by rope and they disappear behind a slope. This empty stage darkens to reveal only Khan in silhouette, when all of a sudden five backlit musicians appear, suspended like a surreal choir dressed in white. The entire hall takes a collective gasp, as this is a moment of choreographic perfection; the dancer in darkness, the musicians visible but inaccessible.

Xenos tells of the travails of war with the hint of gun fire, the roll call of fallen soldiers, the debris of no-man’s land. In one sequence, Khan coils lengths of rope around his face. His obscured face resem­bles a Mrinalini Mukherjee installation where the hemp fibre takes the shape of the human.

A gramophone becomes both an ear­piece and a loudspeaker. As an audience member one tries to find meaning in every gesture, in every convulsion, in the cascade of thousands of pinecones. At the end of the show, one is not left with a story, but with a feeling. For that brief hour, one was absorbed, and one felt awe. During his performance at the Jamshed Bhabha Theatre, the audience sat in rapt attention. Not a phone went up to shoot the performance, aware of the impossi­bility of capturing the truth of the stage.

Khan is proud to say that he is “obsessed” with dance, it is not a switch he can turn on and off. He lives in the state of dance—to see the world through the lens of art—which he learned as a 13-year-old working with Peter Brooks in the Mahabharata. He feels dancers of the younger generation are often too interested in the result rather than the process, he urges them to remember that being on stage is a gift. It is a gift to have an audience commit their time and attention to you.

He says, “The people who are chang­ing the world in a good way are obsessed with what they do. So, in a sense, Mavin and I are re-educating or reminding danc­ers to become obsessed, to fall in love with dance again.” As he retires from solos, and focuses on choreography, Khan is sure to make the audience and dancers fall in love with dance, again and again.

Akram KhanartchoreographyculturedanceXenos