Article by:
Judith Mackrell
When Akram Khan was complimented by Mikhail Baryshnikov on the beauty of his dancing, it was one of the proudest but most ambivalent moments of his career. “Misha said he really admired the quality of my stillness,” Khan recalls. “And I was like, I’m so touched by this, but what about my turns?”
Any dancer might blanch at having their hard-won movement skills overlooked in favour of their ability to do essentially nothing. Yet when I think back over the three decades of Khan’s adult performing career, it’s those charged moments of stillness I remember with the greatest awe. As a dancer he could rev his performance up to a vortex of whirling, stamping, strobing energy yet, in an instant, he could also switch himself down to a quietness so pure that the world seemed to be holding its breath.
There is no question that his command of dynamic extremes has made Khan one of the most physically thrilling dancers of his generation. Yet it’s those zen moments of hush that speak most deeply to the spirit of his performances, the ability Khan has to communicate, even to the most secular of audiences, that his dancing is a form of ritual, in touch with forces larger than itself.
Khan absorbed this sense of ritual from his training in Kathak, the South Asian classical form that has fundamentally shaped him as a dancer. I remember him in his 2001 solo recital, Polaroid Feet, teasing out the rhythms of the tabla player with the percussive music of his own broad powerful feet, producing an orchestra of sounds that modulated from a thunderous rap to a fluttering as delicate as a hummingbird. Like any kathak virtuoso, Khan seemed to posses two separate dancing brains: one that controlled the exacting logic of his footwork, one that allowed his upper body to float eloquently graceful and free. Despite his relatively solid build, Khan could move with a silken lightness, his arms weightless, his torso dipping and arching with the elasticity of a ballerina.
Khan has continued to be faithful to his kathak roots – he says that he still sees dance through a kathak eye. Yet as a kid he was inspired by Michael Jackson, as a young adult he trained in western contemporary dance, and in his 1999 film Loose in Flight, we can see all the fearless exhilaration with which Khan pushed his body into new terrain. Elements of academic kathak are present in his dancing but they’re dismantled into a language of short, sharp, edgy urban gesture, and thrown drastically off balance by hurtling breakdance moves, torpedo rolls and falls.
Over the years, collaborations with the ballerina Sylvia Guillem and the flamenco maverick Israel Galván have brought other elements into play, and as a mature dancer, Khan has become master of an astonishingly expressive range. In his autobiographical solo Desh (2011) he seemed to embody an entire picture book of imagery, dancing through the honking chaos of Bangladeshi street life, through awkward conversations with his father, and through the traditional tales that he tried to pass on to his own child. In Until the Lions (2016), his portrayal of king Bheeshma was like nothing he’d danced before, with all of his characteristic shape-shifting fluidity forced into the stiffened angry gait of a lonely embattled warrior. In Xenos, which receives its UK premiere at the end of May, Khan will perform a very different kind of soldier: a young Indian villager drafted into the first world war, his mind and body trying to make sense of its industrial scale of destruction.
If Xenos promises to give us a new view of Khan’s dancing it will also be the last major role in which we’ll see him on stage. He will continue to create of course, and we know from the Giselle he created for English National Ballet, and from his recently recast and reworked Kaash, that he can produce marvellous things on bodies other than his own. Yet to see Khan dance his own choreography has been, for me, one of the highlights of my time as a critic. Preternaturally gifted, entirely distinct, Khan ranks among those once-in-a-generation performers who can redefine our idea of what dancing is or might possibly be.
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