Coming from, going to: Akram Khan at 50

Akram Khan. Photo: Camilla Greenwell.

Author Sanjoy Roy

From southwest London, as it happens. Both his parents had arrived there in the early 1970s from Bangladesh, a nation that had just been established, after a bloody and brutal war of independence. In London, Khan’s father set up an Indian restaurant. His mother became a schoolteacher, and had high cultural aspirations for her son, teaching him Bengali folk dances from the age of three and sending him to kathak classes from the age of seven. Khan, like so many dancers of a certain generation, was also hugely inspired by Michael Jackson, and won dancing competitions at school with his tribute acts. By 10, he was already performing in public in The Adventures of Mowgli produced by London’s Academy of Indian Dance (now simply Akademi). Sitar maestro Ravi Shankar was present during the production and strongly encouraged the boy to keep performing. It was here too that Khan was spotted by a scout for legendary theatre director Peter Brook, which led to an audition to join Brook’s touring production of the Indian mythological epic The Mahabharata. By the age of 13, Khan was touring worldwide.

It could not have been easy for the boy to return to school in suburban London. He was still obsessed with dance, and had had his eyes opened to a wide wide world. But he more or less dropped out of school, while his parents still wanted him to get a good, respectable university degree. He managed a compromise, enrolling for a contemporary dance degree at De Montfort University, Leicester, where he was amazed to discover whole other worlds of dance, as embodied by companies such as Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal and Lloyd Newson’s DV8 Physical Theatre. From there, he went on to train more rigorously as a dancer at Northern Contemporary Dance School, graduating with the highest ever marks yet awarded by the school. It was around that time that Val Bourne at Dance Umbrella invited him onto the Percussive Feet programme.

A culture, a time, a place

So that was where he came from, and the story puts in place several elements that went on to recur throughout Khan’s career: classical kathak, contemporary dance, commercial dance, famous figures, international touring, a strong technique and a compelling stage presence. Yet to “come from” somewhere is about more than personal biography: it’s also about cultural milieu. Khan came of age and to the stage as part of a certain demographic in Britain. Before his generation, many people of south Asian origin arrived in the UK, particularly from the 1950s through to the 1970s. They came for many reasons (work, study, displacement by war, political exile), and as former British colonial or commonwealth subjects they had, at that time, various residency, employment and citizenship rights. Khan’s parents were among them.

Whatever their backgrounds, these people shared two common experiences: migration, and racism. In response to the former, they typically adapted to the place they lived in while holding dear their connections to the place they had left. In response to the latter, they often endured by working hard and keeping quiet, motivated by the aspiration of more secure futures for their children. 

Those children though, experienced different circumstances. Born and raised in Britain but often treated as foreigners, they were also foreigners to – yet descendants of – their parents’ countries and cultures. As they grew up, this generation began to find their own voices and forms of expression to navigate such pluralities, contradictions and misrecognitions – making the mid-1980s through the 1990s a transformative time for British-Asian culture. Nowhere was more emblematic of this change than Goodness Gracious Me, a primetime television comedy series made by young British Asians that lampooned their families, their compatriots and themselves. It was confident, irreverent, and roamed freely across cultural boundaries. 

Growing into a style

A similarly adventurous, hybrid spirit had already been animating the currents of diasporic south Asian literature, music and theatre – one that drew from traditions without fossilising or sanctifying them, was open to all kinds of crossings and coincidences, and was motivated by their artistic potential. In dance, choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh broke new ground in this area in the early 1990s, with her envelope-pushing formal experiments, initially deriving from classical Indian dance but expanding to embrace a whole range of idioms and compositional forms. And in the late 1990s, Akram Khan became the key figure to forge his own path into this terrain.

If Jeyasingh’s point of entry had been through choreographic composition, Khan’s was through dance vocabulary. His first notable work was the Loose in Flight solo, created in 1995, performed at Dance Umbrella in 1996, and adapted for national television in 1998. The film version, by Rachel Davies, is illuminating. You can see and sense the tensions between classical and contemporary styles, and the fluency with which Khan traverses them. The setting is urban, the soundscore layers gamelan-like chimes with industrial noise and distorted vocal chants. Above all, you sense the distinctive dynamic of Khan the dancer: grounded, exact, alloying steely strength with liquid flow, as commanding in stillness as in motion.

Khan’s next major solo, Fix (2000), showed more of these qualities, to music by Nitin Sawhney – an erstwhile member of the Goodness Gracious Me team, later a phenomenally successful composer whose hybrid journeys echoed Khan’s own, and with whom Khan would collaborate many times. But a key turning point had come the previous year, when Khan, following a spell working with British choreographer Jonathan Burrows, participated in X-Group, a transformative programme for new choreographers hosted by the PARTS school in Brussels which brought him into contact with a large group of dancers, and with major international choreographers. The immediate choreographic outcome was Rush (2000), a trio for Khan, Gwyn Emberton and Moya Michael. If it had the hallmarks of an early group composition by a talented dancer (the phrasing seems to be all Khan’s, the composition somewhat overly geometric), the underlying physical inspiration – the “rush” of freefall skydiving – was eminently suited to the style, with its alternations of speed and stillness; and once again, Khan made stillness feel as intense as action.

Support, direction

Many people recognised Khan’s distinctive qualities, but no career is made solely on the basis of talent, and Khan’s would certainly have been very different without the commitment of several others. Foremost of these was Farooq Chaudhry, who had spotted Khan while he was dancing with Jonathan Burrows, and was instrumental in getting Khan into X-Group. More than a decade older than Khan, as a British-born child of Pakistani migrants who had, against the odds, entered the dance world, Chaudhry shared important common ground with Khan. He set up the Akram Khan Company in 2000 (Rush was their first production), determined that Khan be treated as an artist, not a cultural representative. He had high ambitions for the company, and while it is arguable whether (or how) Khan might have benefited from a less hothouse trajectory, it is fair to say that Chaudhry’s drive as creative manager and producer established a direction for Khan’s career – steering it definitely away from the doldrums of multiculturalism that British funding structures sometimes propelled artists into.

The other people were programmers. Dance Umbrella director Val Bourne was an early believer in Khan’s potential, as was Julia Carruthers at London’s South Bank Centre, where Khan performed several times. A step-change came in 2005 when Alistair Spalding, director of London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre appointed a series of associate artists, including Khan. Sadler’s Wells was already imparting a new status and cachet to contemporary dance in the UK, and its backing was a major boost to its associate artists. 

                  

Notes from the travelogue

So that is where Khan came from – but where did he go to? Rather than provide a comprehensive account of the journey, let me instead sketch some outlines and single out some landmarks within it. One high point was certainly Zero Degrees (2005), co-choreographed and performed with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. Its theme was bodies alive and dead, both as material and idea, as they crossed real and imaginary frontiers – landing all the more potently as the work premiered the day after the London terrorist bombings of July 2005. Embedded in personal story, Zero Degrees powerfully meshed action with abstraction, with life-size dummies of the dancers’ bodies (by sculptor Antony Gormley) as integral to the choreography as the dancers themselves. Crucial, too, was the feeling that Khan had found a worthy counterpart in Cherkaoui – very different in style, build and mindset yet a physical and artistic match.

Zero Degrees was the first of a trilogy based on the idea of an unexpected encounter, though its later instalments produced diminishing returns: Sacred Monsters the following year paired Khan with superstar French ballerina Sylvie Guillem in a captivating if sometimes drifting exploration of their own dance histories, while in-i (2008), with the even starrier French actress Juliette Binoche, was best seen as interesting but unsuccessful experiment. Yet the encounter idea has proven potent since – in Gnosis (2010), created with formidable Japanese performer and kodo percussionist Yoshie Sunahata (her role later taken by Taiwanese dancer Fang-yi Sheu), and in Torobaka (2014), where his counterpart was flamenco iconoclast Israel Galván.

In these “worthy opponent” duets, Khan was able to dance, essentially, as himself. As with many gifted dancers – perhaps especially those trained in traditionally solo forms, such as kathak – a crucial and necessary journey has been to find out how to choreograph others. Khan’s early group works Rush (2000), Related Rocks (2001) and Kaash (2002) gave the impression that his own body was the main wellspring for the tightly reined choreography. But by Ma (2004) he was already giving greater license to his performers, and since then all his group works have drawn strength from the different strengths of his dancers. That was unavoidable in his work with ballet companies – National Ballet of China for Bahok (2008), English National Ballet for Dust (2014), Giselle (2016) and Creature (2023) – but even with his contemporary works, you notice how well and how many of his own dancers imparted their own forces and flavours to the choreography. 

Khan has always found or attracted very strong contemporary dancers who, like Khan himself when he performs, pack the work with a level of skill and vitality that sometimes masks, or compensates for, a certain inattention to the framework in which they move. To varying degrees, a number of works –  iTMOI, Outwitting the Devil, Until the Lions, Xenos, Creature – present hugely moving performances from the dancers, outstanding sights and sounds from designers and composers, but still leave you adrift. In short, he can be stronger with charged imagery and shaped phrasing than on drama and composition as such. Perhaps that’s what separates his two epic solo performances: Xenos (2018), which unravelled into a series of individually powerful scenes, searching for purpose and consequence; and the masterful Desh (2010), in which set, sound and story held a secure frame for each scene, allowing Khan freedom of movement and expression within it.

From and to

Now that I have mentioned three of my top moments from Khan’s history – his precocious performance at the Percussive Feet platform, plus the undoubted artistic high points of Zero Degrees and Desh – let me add one more: his short, moving sequence, barely six minutes long, for the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. Many in the UK remember that ceremony, directed by film-maker Danny Boyle, as a vision of the best of what Britain could be: open, non-conformist, pluralist, community-minded, self-aware. It was highly significant that Khan, a British-Bangladeshi boy from south London, played a key role in this keenly watched national event. Based on the idea of mortality, Khan’s choreography paid tribute to those killed in the 2005 London bombings – but it was also a tribute to life and to hope. Watching it today, it feels like both an assertion of a kind of Britishness and an affirmation of Khan’s own career. Set to a Christian hymn sung by a Scottish-Zambian musician, Khan emerges from a multinational flock of dancers to encounter a young boy, who might represent the future but could equally be his own younger self. Man and child merge into the group, then hold the boy up as if to say: wherever you came from, you can, with our support, go from this place, to any place.