DANCE: Chinese dance collaboration was a great Leap forward for Akram Khan

Feb 29 2008 by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

WHEN the 16th annual Leap dance festival opens in Liverpool tomorrow, there will be much to look forward to, including appearances by leading companies like the New York’s Decadancetheatre group and the French-Canadian Le fils d’Adrien danse.

But the jewel in the fortnight’s dance crown will be an appearance by the Akram Khan Company with a new work co-commissioned by festival organisers Merseyside Dance Initiative and the Culture Company.

Khan, a 35-year-old Balham-born dancer/ choreographer is simply one of the most exciting talents to emerge in the British dance world in recent years.

Dancing from the age of seven in the Kathak classical style of North India (he is of Bangladesh origin) by the age of 14, he was appearing in Peter Brook’s legendary production of Mahabharata.

He went on to study contemporary western dance, and in 2000 created his own company and has produced a series of works that have wowed the critics, from dance pieces in which he worked with artists like Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley to a duet with French ballet star Sylvie Guillem and part-choreographing Kylie Minogue’s Showgirl tour.

His new piece for Liverpool – where it will have its European premiere on March 7 and 8 – is one of his most fascinating collaborations for far.

He has joined forces with the National Ballet of China for Bahok, a work that also has a new score from regular collaborator Nitin Sawhney.

The collaboration with the Chinese ballet company came about almost by accident, he tells me.

“Madam Zhao Ruheng, the artistic director of the National Ballet of China, was in Hong Kong at a seminar when my producer met her and discovered that she was interested in my doing something for her company.

“Well, my producer has known me for a long time and told her that I was not interested in doing a piece for another company at this stage but I might be interested in a collaboration.

“She agreed, he came back to London and spoke to me about it and I was fascinated. I have always wanted to work with Chinese artists.”

In April, he auditioned Chinese dancers, started work on the piece last July and for a month in November worked with the Chinese dancers and his own company in London.

By January, it was given its world premiere in Beijing. “It was a really nice audience and they were very positive,” he reports.

But what did he want from his Chinese dancers? “I was looking for dancers who tell stories in their bodies,” he explains. “I was interested to see not just a ballet dancer but someone who is a bit more.

Although Khan’s own background was in Indian and contemporary dance, he did study classical ballet. “But that was really just for information, knowledge and experience. Classical ballet has a discipline about it as does Indian dance which I trained in. All classical art has this kind of discipline which is something I wanted to obtain.”

He did not have to retrain his Chinese dancers, he says.

That was important, he suggests, as Bahok is the first piece in his career that he is not dancing in himself. “So the material that usually generates from my body was not present and I took all the material and their personal stories from their bodies.”

He works them hard, too. “Sometimes I take it to the extreme to see at what point they start to break. To find their sense of fragility is fascinating for me.”

There are eight dancers in the new work, three Chinese, five from his own company, and of various nationalities.

Behok in Bengali means carrier, and all his dancers are “carriers”, he says.

“These eight individuals are in this space on stage and the space could be anywhere, a train station or an airport, and they are stuck there, trapped, waiting.

“It’s a bit like the opposite of Babel where everyone spoke the same language and eventually spoke different languages. In my scenario, they all speak different languages.

“The universal connection between them is that they all have a longing for home but the interpretation of home can be very different – my home might be my body, somebody else’s a childhood reference to where they grew up, for another person it could be a sensation like the time a father passed away.

“Each person has a different view of home but the universal message is that home is a centre.”

The music, unusually for Khan these days, is on tape. “I have worked with live music for the last three years so it is strange to come back to recorded music,” he admits. “But it is a strong piece of music and I am very happy with it.”

He has not changed anything about the work since that Chinese premiere. “If anything, it should grow internally,” he suggests.

Future company pieces are all now unlikely to feature Khan as a dancer. “If I am in a work and it travels for two years, it means I can’t do anything else,” he explains.

But the dancing continues. In fact, he will miss the premiere in Liverpool because he is dancing in New Zealand with Sylvie Guillem again, and he is also working on a new dance piece with Oscar-winning French actress Juliette Binoche, due to be premiered in London later this year.

* BAHOK, by the Akram Khan Company, is at the Liverpool Playhouse on March 7 and 8. The Leap dance festival runs from tomorrow until March 15.