Akram Khan is one of the most celebrated and respected dance artists and storytellers today. Khan’s work stays rooted in long-term creative partnerships and is mostly known for its distinctive blend of Kathak and contemporary dance – two genres that in his work defy any sense of categorisation. In two decades, the British choreographer of Bangladeshi heritage has created a body of work that has made an important contribution to the art of dance in both the UK and Europe. For Extra Extra we spoke about his vast sensorial practice and the desensitised body within it, vertical versus horizontal time, preservation of dance, the art of doubt and the pleasure of drowning.
Still from Jungle Book reimagined character trailer: Wolves, 2021. Courtesy of Akram Khan Company. Photo: Ambra Vernuccio
Judith Vrancken: Allow me to dive right in. In the age of sophisticated technology, physical movement is slowly disappearing out of our bodies. For me at least, this has elicited a desire to hold on to sensory knowledge and experience, a wish to amplify the senses, both in the way we utilise our bodies as well as in how language, images and our surroundings affect us. From what I’ve seen and have experienced in your work, there seems to be an urgency to not only express and explore the senses but also to find ways of resistance and protest against the temptation of a certain level of contemporary desensitisation. Within the context of Extra Extra, which focuses predominantly on experiencing the world through the lens of the erotic, I wonder how the erotic and the sensual have been a part of developing your deeply sensorial practice.
Akram Khan: The erotic is a very interesting concept, because in a sense it’s so far away from my own journey in creating work or how I see bodies. It’s a cultural and a religious thing, too, even though I’m not religious.
When COVID happened, I felt it was the beginning of the end of what I consider to be the last human ritual – the collective effort of going to the theatre. Fortunately, that’s not the case, but it is getting dangerously close to this ritual dying out. Not just because of the advancement of technology, but because the purpose of technology is to make your life easy. Technology bypasses the process by default. The process is experiential. I don’t know what it is like to be a dramaturge at different dance companies for however many years. I can imagine it, but only you can talk about the truth of that experience, because you’ve experienced it. You’ve been through the ups and the downs and the process. Technology foregoes this experience. It makes us solely want the end goal, the immediate answer. The original purpose of human gatherings, to sit with a group of people that you don’t know, started from our great great ancestors sitting in a cave around a fire, which developed into gatherings at temples, mosques, synagogues, monasteries, etc. The original purpose of that gathering was to awaken the senses.
…when you go into the theatre, people wear perfume. It’s not about you smelling good for yourself. It’s about smelling good for other people, to awaken their sense of smell…
Judith: How so?
Akram: These buildings often look beautiful. Why? Because they awaken the sense of sight. As you enter, you hear chanting, singing or praying, arousing the sense of hearing. You touch their interiors, often made of special materials, inviting us to feel, or there can be incense burning, triggering your sense of smell. Sometimes, you are given blessed food, exciting your taste buds. This is the original purpose of gathering, to awaken the five senses right from prehistoric times, to religious times, to modern times where we do that in the theatre. We always say, do you want to go out for dinner before or after, right? So, there’s this immediate awakening of taste. Of course, when you go into the theatre, people wear perfume. It’s not about you smelling good for yourself. It’s about smelling good for other people, to awaken their sense of smell. I always remind artists how incredible it is when a person buys a ticket to their performance, because what they are really doing is signing a contract that says: I’m going to give you two hours of my attention, to shut out everything else. What makes the theatre space special is not the building, but the 1000-plus people focusing in your direction and being present in the present. If you can hold them in the present for as long as possible, you know you’ve created a masterpiece [laughs].
I am worried that this ritual is going to disappear. Technology is shifting us simultaneously to the past and the future. It doesn’t allow for you to be in the present. I was doing a duet with flamenco artist Israel Galván Reyes several years ago, and both of us were shocked to discover we both came up with a ritual, approximately an hour before the show in which we were figuring out excuses for how to cancel the performance, because we were both terrified. Yet the moment both of us stepped on stage it felt like plunging into deep water, as a baptism of sorts that demanded us to be in the present.
Once you’re on stage, it’s almost godly. There’s no turning back. I call it the pleasure of drowning.
One has to find the pleasure of drowning, and, to come back to my previous point, I think technology takes away that pleasure, since it gives us the illusion of being in control. Besides technology, I think clock time messed it all up. Manmade industrial time, or Westernised time, is vertical. It’s patriarchal time, it’s money time, it’s economic time. It’s about controlling people. What I love about the theatre is that it doesn’t exist in that time. It goes into the world of deep time, which is ocean time, which is life and death time, cyclical time, sensual time, experiential time and feminine time. Horizontal time. I call our body our land. That’s what we live in. And what worries me is that we are becoming orphans of our own land.
Judith: I think that also shows in your work very much. There’s this sense of urgency, as if I’m watching research play out or somebody who’s looking for not a specific answer but maybe an alternative answer. As if there has to be another way, another answer. There must be another way to formulate that.
Akram: My mother was a very strong feminist. And I grew up with all these mythologies. I mean, I’m talking about Greek mythology, Hindu, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, some of Eastern Southeast Asia, Asian, Chinese, quite a bit of African, and, of course, some European. So, regarding the story of Adam and Eve, she told me the plot from Eve’s perspective, not Adam’s, and Jesus’ story was told through Mary Magdalene’s perspective. The prophet Muhammad’s story was told through one of the eldest wife’s perspectives. In other words, every single story was told by a female protagonist. I didn’t realise that until I went to university and people were talking about religion and culture, and then there was this huge clash. That’s when I realised that I was up against the whole world, because my mother had guided me since I was a child to see it from her perspective – which is very incredible in some ways. When I confronted her, she said: ‘Most myths are written by men. I wanted you to experience a narrative through the female perspective. You grew up in a Muslim society. I didn’t want the men to tell you how to be. I wanted you to question that. Once you stop questioning something, it becomes it.’ You must constantly be in the present, and ask every once in a while: What does this mean to me? Who am I? How does this affect me? What does this story mean to me? My mother has been very instrumental in my critical thinking.
Jungle Book reimagined, 2022. Courtesy of Akram Khan Company. Photo: Ambra Vernuccio
Judith: Next to your movement language being so deeply communicative and offering new ways of approaching narrative and narrative structures, some of your bigger productions are reiterations of existing, sometimes very explicit, narratives such as your production of Giselle (2016) for the English National Ballet, or Until the Lions (2016) that was performed by your own company. How do you employ narrative as another communication tool in your work?
Akram: The mind can produce extremely fascinating storytelling. I struggled a lot at school, especially with sitting in front of a desk and memorising stuff, yet when it came to storytelling, that was the only moment I stood still. Because I would constantly ask: Why are we doing this? Where are we going? Why are those choices being made? I suppose that hasn’t changed.
Judith: You mentioned the audience before. When working with themes that excavate the human experience, I wonder about your relationship with the audience. How does their presence play a part in your work, particularly in a piece such as Jungle Book reimagined (2022) that, in an extensive immersive exercise, addresses climate change?
Akram: I want to become one with the audience. I remember going to the cinema as a child and being mesmerised by these characters who felt like gods because they were larger than life. Dance and theatre performances are the opposite for me. The characters on the silver screen are an illusion, pixels of light. Whereas an audience in the theatre is further away but views the whole picture, which means you start to see that they’re human. I’m not sure I explained that very well. For me, the work itself is a structure to arrive at that feeling. If I can hit the audience in the guts at some point during the performance, then I’ve done my job well.
Judith: I was rewatching some clips of Jungle Book reimagined and Giselle. Even on screen it is incredible what this does to your body. I may be a bit more susceptible to that than the average viewer because I see many performances and I spend a lot of time in the theatre, but there is something about them that made this an extremely physical experience. It’s not just being moved by movement, or composition or music. There is something that goes beyond that, and it’s genuinely hard to not get emotional. Especially when you see your work live, it’s quite overwhelming. You would have to be very hard-wired not to feel anything.
Akram: I feel there are two ways of entering that feeling. One of them is playing the feeling. The other one is Igor Stravinsky’s way, which is something I’ve always felt connected to. To use patterns to evoke emotion, not to play the emotion to the audience. I think memory in that respect is very important for me. I always ask for the truth from the dancers, although I usually ask them not to tell me anything, but we all know we are shaped by our experience. We are often a collection of choices that were made for us. I lead by such an example and would say: ‘Look, this is my experience with my father. I had rage because of this, this and this.’ So, when I need rage for the character, I just have to put my father on stage and everything will come flooding in. My family is always on stage with me, even my aunties and uncles, even my pretend aunties and uncles. When I do a solo I’m never alone. I flirt with truth all the time, and I need the dancers to be able to do that too. Not that this is therapy, but I need them to connect to truth, I need to connect to my truth.
The rise of me and the rise of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui happened simultaneously, we’re like brothers, from different mothers. Both of us were attracted to each other’s work. And that’s why we ended up creating zero degrees (2005), which was unusual for two choreographers at the rise of their careers to create together, let alone dance together. It was really interesting that both of us were interested in each other’s languages more than we were in our own. We wanted to learn from each other. As choreographers and directors, we are observers of the most minuscule details. I think what we shared at that point was primarily curiosity. Secondly, the moment you ask a question there is a small seed of empathy. A lot of my work comes out of empathy. This means it comes out of the word, the act of listening, truly listening, which only happens when you stop waiting to speak. If someone who didn’t know anything about me came to the studio, they would be, like, who the hell is leading this?
Judith: Tell me about that process. How does a work, especially a larger-scale production, come to be? What is your starting point?
Akram: To create one work takes three years, in three stages. Each year is a different stage. For the first year and a half, I’m in and out of the studio. You just don’t know who’s leading the process since it involves many different collaborators. We gather as much information as we can – but the first day that we start on the idea is like planting a seed. I plant a seed, and I put it on the table. Then the collaborators come on board. And then we spend time, once a month, gathering. I then end up with what Peter Brook would call a ‘formless hunch,’ or a smell or a colour. The second half of that second year is the process of the absurd. I bring all of the gathered information into the studio. It’s hundreds and hundreds of documents, poems, films, photographs and texts that we hang on the wall, or we leave on the floor, and we play with them. I commit to nothing. It’s the pleasure of drowning, once again. In the third year, it becomes clearer and it’s undeniable that I am the director. It’s really this feminine shape of the funnel [forms a V shape with his arms], where the top is wide and as we go downwards it narrows. At the top is a cacophony of voices. Everyone is speaking. It drives some of my collaborators mad because all boundaries are blurred. Then it filters through, and at a certain point I hear my voice, and I find myself again.
…In order for the familiar to be meaningful, we have to incorporate the unfamiliar. Even in ideas there has to be tension…
Judith: Dance opens up many oppor-tunities for collectivity and partnership that can be expressed through curiosity, adaptability and even malleability. You are known for having established long- term collaborations with several people such as dramaturge Ruth Little, com-poser Vincenzo Lamagna and costume designer Kimie Nakano. How has the kinship within these connections informed your practice over the years?
Akram: When I work on a project, 80% of the team usually consists of the same people. Some of these people I have worked with for years. So 20% are people we’ve never worked with – this is necessary, they are the seed of doubt, of questioning. That way, we are always in the process with a certain sense of unfamiliarity. In order for the familiar to be meaningful, we have to incorporate the unfamiliar. Even in ideas there has to be tension. And just like in my work with Sidi Larbi, I need another person to give birth to the concept of collaboration. Collaboration for me is not like the creative partnership between John Cage and Merce Cunningham. They are both incredible artists – but that’s not what I’m saying. Rather, it was an experiment where two people were doing two different things and putting them together. Larbi and I have two different identities running through our blood. He is half Moroccan and half Flemish. I am fully Bangladeshi, but I’ve only known England, because I was born here. I’m not fully British English, but I’m definitely not fully Bangladeshi either. That in-between is created by the tension of two things opposing each other.
Judith: In an interview with Curve Theatre’s Nikolai Foster, you said that your ‘body is kind of a museum, instilled with memories of Bangladesh by family members through music, dance, poetry, in order to not forget, to keep the memories alive.’ How do you view your work as a vessel for these memories, that, as I can imagine, are infused with a sensorial overload from the past?
Akram: I think the way I view my work, carrying or being in transition between past and present or into the future, is problematic. I think that goes for most people. It was funny, I was just talking to my wife today at lunchtime, and I was saying that for a lot of choreographers, when they remount their work many years later, there’s an exact pathway, a replication. In 2010 I created a vertical road, which then went to the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in 2012. I changed it slightly. I altered it because it didn’t resonate the same way. The dancers were not the same either. It then went to the Royal Danish Ballet. I took the version from the school to the Royal Danish Ballet, which has a high level of classical dancers, and it performed an extraordinary version. But it changed again because it evolved. Then it returned to the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, and I changed it again. Finally, it’s coming to Boston Ballet, which will premiere in October. Again, it is going to look like a completely different version to the original one. It has changed, it has evolved so much. So, I said to my wife: ‘In order for the work to be alive, I have to ask what does it mean to me now?’
In iTMOi (in the mind of igor) Khan explores how composer and conductor Igor Stravinsky transformed the classical world of music by evoking emotions through patterns, rooted in the concept of a woman dancing herself
to death, rather than through expression
Judith: That is a huge topic I don’t think a lot of choreographers or repertory companies deal with enough. It is so often about this idea of restaging existing work, even sort of recasting in similar ways, which can be extremely problematic and not necessarily connect with the times. In line with memories and things past, I’ve been thinking a lot about contemporality. In my recent appointment as dramaturge at Ballett Basel under a new artistic direction there were many conversations about the name of the company, since it is a contemporary company and not a classical ballet company in the conven-tional sense. However, ballet is just as contemporary a genre as any other. It changes, rewires, alters direction. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum that solely relies on classical principles that need to stay the same. In dance, we often speak of ‘contemporary’ versus ‘ballet,’ or ‘folk dance’ versus ‘traditional.’ Instead, all of these seemingly contrasting ‘disciplines’ are up for constant negotiation and exploration in the present, and house a particular contemporality of their own. I see this in your work, particularly in your use of Kathak and how you weave it through your movement language while utilising it not as a representation of tradition but as a valuable and crucial contemporary component. Could you talk a bit more about the role of traditional practices within contemporary ones, especially in light of your use of Kathak?
Akram: Yes, that’s so true. I preach that all the time, so it’s weird to hear somebody else say that. Most people don’t think like that. It’s very rare. When we’re looking at traditional – I call it ‘traditional’ just for the sake of people’s desire to contextualise it – people of my time often say, ‘Well, that’s a bit boring, isn’t it? This doesn’t relate to me.’ Of course it doesn’t relate to you – nobody’s looked at it again! Therefore, I ask myself: what does this mean to me now? There is nothing new. That’s the other thing. Everything is an evolution of something. It’s a mutation or inspiration from something. There is no such thing as original. A friend of mine, theatre director Simon McBurney, was performing The Encounter (2015), a beautiful solo theatre piece. I met him before the show in his dressing room. We talked about the past and future a lot. He told me a story about a journalist and photographer who went to the Amazon because he wanted to meet a tribe that had never encountered anybody outside of their community. He eventually found them, and presented a watch to the chief, who asked: ‘Why is time moving this way?’ For us, everything moves forward, we’re moving into the future, and the past is behind us. It’s gone. The chief responded: ‘In our culture, in our tribe, the past is in front of you, because it has happened, you can see it. The future is behind you, because you cannot see it. In order to understand my future, I constantly put my past in front of me.’ I look at tradition in the same way. I’m interested in traditional myths. I’m interested in traditional forms, even with their problems, and I want to re-question them. It is a similar process to writing. The work shows you what it wants to be or where it wants to go, and what its truth is.