He’s the darling of the dance world, and beyond, with artists such as Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley lining up to work with him
The Big Interview by Christina Patterson
Photo/Susannah Ireland
“In Asian culture,” says Akram Khan, “you don’t have a voice. You just accept what everybody says.” It is, I have to say, rather hard to believe now. The darling of the dance world has a reputation for pushing the boundaries of his form, tossing in a visual artist here, a musician there, a writer there, and then maybe adding, just for fun, an actress who’s never danced in her life. Hailed as “the great new hope” and “wunderkind” of contemporary dance, “a phenomenon” and “a marvel”, he’s an (extremely muscular) human whirlwind, leaping from project to project, and travelling the world on an endless, exhaustive, exhausting quest for new ideas, new creative partnerships, new marriages of story and feeling and form. For a man obsessed with the idea of stillness, he’s remarkably bad at it. Brilliant on stage, but not so good in life.
Here, on a Saturday night at Sadler’s Wells (the only spare hour, apparently, in his entire week) he is all coiled energy and focus. Perched on a plastic chair in a giant rehearsal room that’s eerily quiet, this short, bald, brown man has a poised presence that radiates through the room. His voice is quiet and his manner is gentle. “In my community, it was really tough,” he says. “I disagreed all the time, but it was in my head.” What, this man who has worked with Anish Kapoor, and Hanif Kureishi, and Juliette Binoche, and Kylie Minogue, never stood up to anyone in his community? Ever? “No,” he says in that half-whisper, “because it’s a form of disrespect.”
No wonder, then, that he understands that different kind of respect, the gang culture in which any minuscule signal of the lack of it is enough to pay for with your life. In his new solo work, Gnosis, which opens Svapnagata, a two-week festival of Indian music and dance at Sadler’s Wells (co-curated with his friend and regular collaborator, Nitin Sawhney), he plays a hoodie, to a musical background of Dizzee Rascal. “It’s something familiar in me,” he says, “because that’s how I was when I was young. I was a big fan of Michael Jackson and I was really into hip-hop.”
That, however, is the second half. The first half is kathak, the classical Indian form that Khan trained in from the age of seven. It’s a form that goes back to the nomadic bards of ancient northern India, and one which uses stylised gestures to tell mythological tales. It’s the first time he has combined classical and contemporary work in one evening, and the aim, he says, is to explore the story of the Mahabharata in both a traditional and a contemporary context. “I was talking to my wife,” he says (the South African dancer Shanell Winlock), “and trying to explain to her about Gandhari, the blind queen in the Mahabharata, but for her to understand I had to tell her everything about it. So that,” he adds, “is the beginning of Gnosis. I wanted to talk about inner knowledge, and for me knowledge wasn’t in books, because I was pushed to read books.”
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Akram Khan Company and National Ballet of China – Bahok
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