Body Pixel

Akram Khan has this interesting approach in his work: choreographing and dancing through mistakes…

Once he said that when people ask him something like: “What do you want to say with your performance?” His answer always remains the same: “No, I don’t have anything to say, I just do!” …and that’s something that thrills me completely… being totally aware of the importance of working processes, ‘because at the end all stuff come back to you’ if I may paraphrase Mr. Sagmeister…

Photo: Carl Fox (c)

So, today a story on Akram Khan’s performance ‘bahok‘ which I saw at Eurokaz – The International Festival of New Theatre two weeks ago…

Akram Khan’s artistic aesthetic has been ‘boiled’ somewhere between mixtures of the East and West. London based dancer of Bangladesh origins was primarily educated in the Indian classical dance form of Kathak from Northern India (guided by the respectable Kathak teacher Sri Pratap Pawar), later on he took the challenge in Western contemporary dance techniques (Graham, Limon, Cunningham…) which resulted in what people today call as ‘cross-cultural expression’. Akram Khan was also a part of the well known Peter Brook’s production Mahabharata when he was 14 old.

Illustration: Chinatsu Sunaga (c) from Sacred Monsters

He holds BA in Performing Arts (Dance) from De Montfort University in Leicester (more oriented towards pure choreography and personal development / individuality), but he also studied at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds, because he needed ‘gimme_more_technique’ oriented approach.

‘It was not a conscious or intellectual development, but simply that my body was making decisions for itself and yes, a unique language of movement was emerging from the confrontation of these two dance forms’ said Akram Khan about his dance language.

Photo: Tristam Kenton (c) from Zero Degrees

Akram Khan’s stage collaborators till now were a real hacker of the ballet scene Sylvie Guillem, amazing performer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, sculptors Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley, musicians Philip Sheppard and Nitin Sawhney, choreographer Lin Hwai Min, etc.

OK, now strait away to his latest piece which he did in collaboration with the National Ballet of China and his own company. For the performance the company says: ‘bahok‘, named after a Bengali word meaning ‘carrier’ explores the ways in which the body carries national identity and a sense of belonging. Khan’s dancers come from diverse cultures, traditions and dance backgrounds – Chinese, Korean, Indian, South-African and Spanish – and this rich mix of both spoken and dance language pushes the boundaries of movement vocabulary. In one of this globalised world’s transit zones they come together. They try to communicate, to exchange their stories, their memories of home.’

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‘bahok’ is placed at the airport where all passengers are waiting for their flight… but all flights are cancelled…

The situation is typical, delayed journeys simply trigger delayed identity questions… It’s interesting how the atmosphere of time rupture automatically opens environment for communication and whatever fits in (talk, laugh, fight, dance, tears…)… but after a while you simply realize that even an ‘easy going chat between two flights’ isn’t possible because of our inner marks, histories, stories… which we carry along sometimes even not noticing it anymore… We all have many tattoos from inside, and from time to time we let them out… consciously or unconsciously…

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It’s pretty understandable that Khan is dealing with identity issues connecting them either directly either symbolically with travelling. The performance pulls out all emotional states characteristic for human beings, and there is no choreographer’s judgment upon it… he wants to tell us that we are in a constant search (you don’t have to be very smart to conclude this), sometimes carried away by our cultural heritage, sometimes by the stupidity of our life situations…

Photo: Liu Yang (c) from bahok

Those who are expecting a dance piece with heavy dynamics and visual grammar which plots the lines between body limbs and the architecture of the stage, could be surprised… because, Khan has decided to make it now more in a sense of classical story telling, so unusual for him.

His aesthetic is always very powerful, with geometrically direct but opened ideas to ‘misfits’ movements which at the end strives to the point.

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Having such a collective of performers with different life and art background applies extremely well in the choreography where every dancer has its unity and the possibility to be what they actually are…

Nitin Sawhney’s sounds have become a little bit softer then in previous years… Sawhney is now more subtle when implementing rhythm sections in his compositions… when ‘driving it’ more ethno-ambient, the beautiful voice of Natasha Atlas still makes me bristle.

Photo: Liu Yang (c) from bahok

Yeah, Akram Khan always makes it multicultural because that’s what he is and despite the fact that he is very very popular somehow he always finds a way to make it a sort of akram_khan-ism which I obviously like… ~«[*_*]»~