What an artist creates is based on his interaction with different people and their cultures, says Akram Khan
Akram Khan is an internationally acclaimed dancer and choreographer. He is the recipient of numerous international awards, the most recent being ‘The Excellence in International Dance' Award by the International Theatre Institute in 2007 and an Honorary Doctorate of Arts award from De Montfort University for his contribution to the UK arts community. Akram Khan talks to Friday on his life and art
My world is characterised by chaos between a rare stillness and constant flight.
My world can only be described in disconnected words - waiting, aeroplanes, airports, hotels... My life is not as impressive as one might think. I am always on the move. I've spent almost ten years of my life travelling. That's a long time to be unsettled. The moments of stillness happen when I am at my home in London with my wife or parents. I still live around the corner from my parents' home. I was brought up strictly and I learnt to respect my culture. My upbringing inspired tranquillity. I embrace that silence willfully.
I learn about a culture through its people. It's not just society that determines its people - it works both ways.
My mother was my first dance teacher.
I began folk dance at home around the age of three. My mother, Anwara Khan, was a dancer in Bangladesh though she has never performed in public. She taught me Bangladeshi folk dance. I didn't want to perform at outdoor Indian festivals in Wimbledon, because nobody would sit and watch. My mother told me that if I could win that audience, I would succeed. That's how I learnt to read the pulse of an audience.
My mother is my best critic. She is all about heart and can be tough and brutal in her criticism. She isn't easily impressed or surprised by my actions.
I studied kathak with the celebrated teacher Sri Pratap Pawar, whose guru is 75-year-old Birju Maharaj, a legend of his time. My mother dragged my sister, Murshida, and I to the Indian Institute in West Kensington to learn kathak. I hated missing Knight Rider and Michael Jackson's dance routines on TV.
At 14, Peter Brook selected me for the legendary production of The Mahabharata as well as for the televised version that followed. I studied contemporary dance at De Montfort University in Leicester and graduated in contemporary dance at De Montfort University in Leeds.
Reviewers often call me a contemporary kathak dancer, but I am not.
Kathak is over 500 years old. It is a narrative form steeped in tradition involving mathematically complex rhythms and moral stories. There's a lot of improvisation involved, and the complex patterns we work from can be extremely intricate. My steps in Ronin start in a traditional format and then instinct takes over and I deliberately confuse everything. I prefer the word ‘confuse' to ‘blend' or ‘mix' or ‘fuse'. It's no longer pure kathak nor is it contemporary. It's like humanity - we are not pure anymore in that we have mixed with other societies and cultures and have thus changed.
A critic once asked me, "Where is your home?" My body is my home.
We are given one body in our lifetime and we cannot choose or change it. It contains DNA, history and tradition passed on to us from our ancestors. It also carries disease and memories. It is spiritual and political. My body carries in it everything I have experienced in my lifetime and it is continuously evolving. I tried to portray that in my dance piece Bahok which means ‘to carry' in Bengali. Eight individuals from different parts of the world come together in a transit lounge and try to communicate and share the things they carry with them - their experiences, the memories of their original homes and the dreams and aspirations that made them move. What they bring with them is a sense of home.
My body is very sensitive to rhythm.
Wherever I am, the first thing that touches me is the rhythm of the place. When I went to China to create Bahok for the National Ballet of China, I struggled to adjust to the rhythm of the place. The language was foreign and I felt like an alien.
Similarly, I found it very difficult to adjust to India, even though I am very much connected to India. I recognise the smells and sounds, but I remain a foreigner, having been born in London where the rhythm is different. The contrasts that exist anywhere you look in the city are sublimely beautiful and shockingly ugly simultaneously.
The range of rhythmic sounds that a place presents is vast and varying. For instance, in Calcutta there is the honking of cars and the shouting of hawkers selling their wares. Other cities in South India are more relaxed and quiet. To me, London has a very hectic and nervous cadence.
I also find the rhythm of the world to be slowly changing. For centuries, the Western world has assumed itself to be at the centre and I think it is finding it very difficult now to accept that it is not. It's time we realised that there is no single centre of the world, so to speak.
Every disaster has some positivity. Creation leads to destruction and vice versa. Birth is always violent. Life is cyclic and poetic and so shifts within the cycle is a good thing.
The UAE has a unique appeal.
There is a tireless spirit that lies in the heart of this country that attracts people from all over the world. I love meeting people of different nationalities on the same day in one place. This eclectic mix amazes me.
As a civilisation, we are losing our senseof discipline.The creative process for Gnosis (a solo dance) is one of transformation. In the dance, a woman chooses to deny herself out of rebelliousness. Because her honour, pride and vows were so strong, this character chose to remain blindfolded through the births, marriages and deaths of her children.
That kind of discipline and commitment intrigues me. However, for me, these themes are just landscapes - the images or sketches from which ideas spring. These ideas are then transformed into a more personal interpretation of the story, which I like to describe as a ‘story of movements'. In the end, it is another person who is retelling the story. Every person has a different way of seeing a story and retelling it.
The great Indian epic Mahabaratha was an external battle. In the dance, the blindfolded Queen Gandhari has a rare resilience that reminds me of my mother.
Generally women are very powerful. You wouldn't find men that resilient. Men tend to be more arrogant, mostly out of fear, I think. I am arrogant, but I learnt from my mother what it means to have a strong character. We fear women. Nature is feminine and when nature unleashes her inner strength, we are often left dumbstruck.
My wife is my best friend.
I talk the most to my wife, Shannell. She is South African and joined my company as a dancer. I fell in love with her and asked her to marry me within the first three weeks of meeting her. I was sure she was the one for me and she was sure that I wasn't. So I proposed to her again the following year at the same time at the same place. She refused again. I repeated my proposal a third time at the same place and at the same time, only this time, she said ‘Yes'! She is my foundation of strength.
When I feel as though I can't go on practising any longer she appears to me in my mind, and that gives me the energy to see through the performance. When I told her this after a performance, her reply was: "Yeah, whatever! Just go practice." Shannell is incredibly practical and realistic. I am the romantic in our relationship. She is intuitive and very honest. I am not that honest, but then again, I suppose I must be to admit that I am dishonest!
As human beings we are all connected in a profound manner, but we are unaware of it.I had just finished a performance at the Sydney Opera House and was waiting for a taxi to get back to the hotel. As I was about to get into the taxi, a couple rudely shoved me off. I was too tired to argue after the show. They got in and then turned around to me and asked, "Are you Akram Khan?" They were very apologetic and offered me the taxi. I told them to go.
So I got into the next taxi. Suddenly for the first time, I had this urge to call my father. I am closer to my mother and rarely call my father. As I dialled the number, I kept thinking, ‘Why am I calling my dad?' My father answered and he asked, "What's wrong?" I told him I was fine. And then we hung up.
Then the taxi driver asked me in Bengali, "Is your father's name Mosharaf Khan? Was he born in a village called Algichor?" I couldn't believe it. How did this random taxi driver in Australia know my dad's name? Then the taxi driver started to cry. It turned out he and my father were best friends who had lost touch years ago. They had been searching for each other for 30 years.
Was it a coincidence that I got into that taxi? Or is there something bigger than us pulling the strings? That, for me, was a miracle. It was a very special moment where I felt that just maybe, we are all connected.
Khan is the recipient of numerous international awards, the latest being The Excellence in International Dance Award by the International Theatre Institute in 2007 and an Honorary Doctorate of Arts award from De Montfort University for his contribution to the UK arts community
Rhythmic traveller
One of the most beautiful things in my life is I get to meet contemporary artists and revel in their art. What an artist creates is based on his interaction with people and their cultures. We absorb it into the stillness of the mind and express it in different ways.
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