This is another review from the Digital Pass section of this year’s Dance Umbrella festival – which runs until 30 Nov. This initiative allows audiences to discover Dance Umbrella’s curation of dance films and documentaries, alongside talks and panel discussions filmed during this year’s festival.
Available for viewing within London’s international dance festival, there are panel discussions, artist encounters, dance films, documentaries, and more.
Akram Khan Company Artist Encounters: Anatomy of a Story
“One of the most influential dance artists of his generation and multi-award-winning choreographer, Akram Khan brings his distinctive voice to this year’s Artist Encounters.
Internationally celebrated and renowned for his ability to tell stories that are both visceral and profoundly human, Khan has created a body of work that is globally celebrated and deeply personal.”
The place is The Bhavan in West Kensington. The interviewee is Akram Khan, dance artist and choreographer; the interviewer is Kevin O’Hare, director of The Royal Ballet. Through an in-depth conversation and live demonstration, we go to the heart of AKC’s practice and intent. The argument is that an audience may not notice everything, but still feel an emotional connection to themes of childhood, struggle, and exhaustion.
The demonstration of a duet from Dust, a piece from Lest We Forget – a dance show I reviewed back in 2014 – features Erina Takahashi and James Streeter. Mavin Khoo, now coach and répétiteur for AKC, notes that “rehearsing cold” is very different than the emotional place dancers reach when performing. The duet is about loss, unfamiliarity, and the cost of war on human connection.
The music is partly the archive recording of a soldier, Edward Dwyer, singing “We’re here because we’re here” to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. Khoo dissects the piece and directs the dancers before a second run-through of the duet, emphasising that stillness, quiet, and the gaze are just as important as any gesture. It also notes how performers can find something additional to the choreography as written that may work.
After 25 minutes of demonstration, the set-up is ready for Khan and O’Hare. Khoo talks of the importance of the venue to Indian dance artists as a safe space. And about rules and possibilities, not about trying to find new ideas.
Now it is the discussion, which touches on Khan’s Bangladeshi family background, and his education in state school, and how he learned dance from his mother and “community of aunties” before he found and trained at The Bhavan under Pratap Pawar, and being inspired by a young white man who danced Kathak.
Then classical and contemporary dance completed his education at De Montfort University and Northern School of Contemporary Dance to build his process through community. He worked with Peter Brook in the Mahabharata at the age of 13. Now 52, Khan is a multi-award-winning artist, and retired from performing in 2018 after his solo show Xenos, created for the World War 1 centenary.
He comes across as a questioning, inspirational, creative, passionate, and focused artist. This interview comes at the point when AKC plans its final production, Thikra: Night of Remembering, which opens in 2027. Influences include Chaplin, Keaton, and Michael Jackson, which he emulated in his dad’s garage when he should have been in school.
Chat also turns to how Mavin Khoo fits into the company now and how their shared obsession with dance and competitiveness built a beautiful friendship. Audiences could be both traditional and contemporary – South Asian or Bollywood, clown comedians or ABBA devotees. And how to reach those who put contemporary dance into a box “they don’t get”. And perhaps the biggest take-away is Khan as disruptor in a world that is “already ruptured”, and that he is comfortable in “silence and stillness,” which has to be earned in choreography.
More on the company here: https://www.akramkhancompany.net