I was at a dress rehearsal in Leicester's Curve theatre of the new ensemble work by Akram Khan, one of Britain's most feted dancer-choreographers, when a male dancer faltered, peering at the boards, and announced: "There's a lot of blood." A pause ensued while the injured troupe member was identified, the dripping leg wound bandaged and the stage mopped. Then the run-through resumed. It was a startling reminder of the pain and blisters behind the beauty.
A fractured shoulder left Khan unable to complete his previous work, Gnosis, in time for its billed premiere. "A dancer talks with his body," he said to a full house at Sadler's Wells Theatre in London. This time "my body talked back". The injury, Khan recalls, was "pretty bad but it wasn't about age". He is 36. "I fell on sweat and landed on my shoulder." It made him reflect: "I'd like to take more time making work. I don't want the big machine of the dance world, with all the adrenalin, to dictate the pace. Audiences have changed and they're greedy — demanding more and more, and quicker. That expectation is going to cripple artistes."
Audiences for contemporary dance have grown in the past decade; the demands on Khan are driven by his success. Classically trained in the North Indian dance form of kathak, he had his first big break when he was 14, touring the world with Peter Brook's Mahabharata team. He became a spellbinding soloist in the 1990s, in both classical recitals and his unique brand of kathak-inflected contemporary dance. Though not the first British choreographer inspired by classical Indian forms (Shobana Jeyasingh was a pioneer), he invented his own vocabulary of movements, an eloquent "confusion" of styles.
Kathak (which means "storyteller") grew from ancient, peripatetic bards interpreting the mythological tales of the Indian epics. Shifting from Hindu temples to Mogul courts, it gained Islamic influences, emerging as a classical art after the British Raj. An ancestor of Spanish flamenco, it uses lightning-fast spins punctuated by statuesque stillness, fluid arm movements and rhythmically controlled foot-stamping with percussive ankle bells. Its journey to Andalucia with the Gypsies via the Arab world was illuminated when Khan danced kathak to the flamenco guitar of his friend and collaborator Nitin Sawhney at Svapnagata, an Indian festival they co-curated at Sadler's Wells last year. Yet influences on Khan's choreography range from hip hop and kabuki to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.
Sawhney sees him as "doing something no one else can. He has no fear, which can be difficult but inspiring." For the artist Anish Kapoor, another collaborator, Khan has "great stage presence. He's second-generation, doing that double-take at the kathak tradition as an insider-outsider."
Since he co-founded the Akram Khan Company ten years ago, his collaborators have included composer Steve Reich, sculptor Antony Gormley and writer Hanif Quraishi. With his first full-length choreographed work, Kaash (2002), with Sawhney and Kapoor, Khan was acclaimed as one of the most exciting choreographers of his generation. Zero Degrees (2005), a duet in which he and Flemish-Moroccan dancer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui performed with Gormley's inanimate body doubles, won a Laurence Olivier award and expanded his audience.
His virtuosity has lured star performers from other disciplines as well. The actor Juliette Binoche, with whom Khan co-directed and performed in-i (2008) for the National Theatre, saw him at Sadler's Wells while filming in London and was struck by "how strong and earthy he was and how soft his voice; the opposition was very attractive". For the ballerina Sylvie Guillem, his partner in Sacred Monsters (2006), "he has an unusual energy and light and a thirst to do things".
Vaulting artistic boundaries using speech and dialogue in his work, Khan even choreographed an Indian temple segment for Kylie Minogue in 2006. Yet his 75-minute performance with Binoche, not a trained dancer, was dismissed as a "vanity project" by some critics. Khan regrets that the work "wasn't ready" when it opened in London. "We're artistes," he says. "It's about taking risks — there's a danger when you stop doing that."
A train journey from the Bangladesh frontier to Calcutta, during which Khan saw an old man die, led to a meditation on borders and in-between spaces, life and death.
His new work, Vertical Road, his largest ensemble work till date (in which he is not performing), was described by a dance critic, Judith Mackrell, as "viscerally thrilling". A traveller's post-apocalyptic journey, it begins with the searing flash of an atom bomb, rupturing a vision of rippling water. Set to Sawhney's original score, and without text, it is billed as a return to "pure movement". Yet for Khan, "it's presenting narrative in another way — less literal, more visual, more visceral". He sees it as being about the journey to faith and the "vertical road" between the earthly and the spiritual. He found inspiration in many places, from Rumi's poetry to the Terracotta Warriors and a taxi driver in Sydney who knew his father. It involves "different stages of a traveller's life through his memories, to prepare for life after death". His parents were in mind, "getting older and fragile, and preparing for death. My mother has a faith that there's something after that."
Although his family is Muslim, for him, "spirituality is far more ambiguous and open. I find religious phenomena beautiful and meaningful but I don't want to say ‘that's it, that's the one'. For me, it's an inspiration and direction." In the piece, dancers grasp and grapple with tomes. "Religious books are like a road we choose, or not," Khan says, tip-toeing into sacred territory. "People tend to turn to them when they can't see the path."
Three of the eight dancers are from Khan's regular company while the other five for the piece, including two from the Middle East, were chosen. "It's not that I just use their bodies as a tool. They bring their own language; their own creativity is a tool." His six-week residency at Curve was a return to the city where he found his "voice", studying contemporary dance at De Montfort University and subsidising his student days as a pizza delivery boy.
Born in London in 1974, he grew up in Wimbledon, where he still lives. His wife Shanell Winlock, a dancer from South Africa, joined his company early on. His father, from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), was a student in Britain in the 1960s and then returned to London with his wife after Bangladesh's independence in 1971. He opened a restaurant in Wimbledon where Khan helped out. "I saw a side of life my parents tried to protect me from. They came when the pubs shut. You'd be there till 2 in the morning and we got a lot of racist abuse. It taught me humility: When people are violent and aggressive, you don't return it and become them. It made me stronger."
Khan was steered into dance by his mother, folk dancing since 3 and learning kathak since 7. "My mother's devotion to me taught me devotion to my art," he says. She was a teacher of the Bengali language in London and Khan grew up bilingual.
In school he won a disco competition with a Michael Jackson Thriller routine, which made him a "real person; before that, even my teacher didn't know I was in the class". A fan of comics and Manga, he also loved maths. Kathak's rhythmically complex footwork relies on intricate mathematical patterns and perfect rapport with the tabla player. "There is so much rigidity and maths in the form. I try to find freedom in that."
After touring with Brook, he felt his path was being "laid down by my parents and guru and [being] pressured by the community". Fleeing to Leicester, he studied Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, and discovered Pina Bausch and DV8. At the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds, he gained top marks in choreography. "It's always when you're lost that you discover something — or yourself," he says. He sees the body as a sponge for new influences. For him, his contemporary work is not fusion but "confusion". Its process is organic, not intellectual. "The intelligence of dance is far greater than intellectualism — the body is more honest and direct," he says.
At Svapnagata, he said the ritual fastening of his ankle bells sets his classical work apart. "There's a sense of spirituality, which is important to me. Classical is me in search of the spiritual and contemporary is me searching for science."
However, Khan has riled some traditionalists. In kathak, he says, the male dancer sports long hair and reflects the deity Krishna. "When I shaved off my hair, there was a huge backlash; they said ‘you're disrespecting'. I said: ‘It's nature. I'm losing my hair.'"
Zero Degrees, in which Khan depicts how a dancer was harassed by border guards and he found himself sharing a train carriage with a corpse, premiered in London within days of July 7, 2005.
"The London bombings had a big impact on me," he says. "I became aware of my colour and the way I was looked at, carrying a bag in a train. I grew self-conscious in a way I never was before, especially in London. There's a paranoia."
Bahok (2008), meaning "carrier" in Bengali, set in an airport transit lounge and using dancers from the National Ballet of China, further explored transience, belonging and the body as a carrier of home and language.
When choreographing, "first I conceptualise what we want to explore. That's usually a year, then it's inherent in your bloodstream. In the studio, I let go of everything. I try not to recreate what's in my head but to let it happen. I know what I want when I find it. It's like a discovery — but sometimes it comes very late."
Gnosis, which premiered earlier this year and is based on a Mahabharata tale of a blindfolded queen, grew into a kabuki-inspired mother-son duet with the Japanese taiko drummer and dancer Yoshi Sunahata. "I love everything Japanese," Khan says. "The sense of precision. Everything's a ritual, even tea. I find that beautiful."
Khan will go to Bangladesh next month to work on a solo piece with a Bengali text, a long-time ambition. It is scheduled for the 40th anniversary of independence in 2011.
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