Akram Khan won a Time Out Live Award back in 2000. Ten years later he’s a world-renowned choreographer, an exhilarating performer, a highly sought after collaborator and – for his services to the arts – an MBE holder. Coincidence? We think not.
Speaking from his rehearsal studio in London, Khan begs to differ. ‘Awards don’t make you an artist,’ he muses. ‘They build your reputation, to a certain degree, but they don’t really push you forward.’
So that award we gave him all those years ago – that springboard, as it were – it meant nothing at all?
‘I’m very grateful and honoured… put it that way,’ he says, sounding as though he’s tiptoeing through a verbal minefield. ‘But I’m more happy for my parents.’
We’re pulling his leg, of course (never easy when said leg belongs to an agile dancer). The first decade of the millennium was kind to Akram Khan, but it’s not as if he didn’t deserve it. To put it in football terms, the boy’s a grafter, and the fruits of his labours are rightly celebrated.
‘I was kind of pushed into it from the age of three by my mother, who wanted me to learn something of her traditions,’ he recalls. She sounds like something of a domineering matriarch, but her perseverance is impressive. ‘My mum was totally devoted to me training, learning,’ he says, admitting that it took a good 13 years before he tuned into her way of thinking. Perhaps the turning point came with his introduction to kathak, a classical dance form from India. ‘I was learning Bangladeshi folk and dance until I was eight… She thought I needed some kind of structure to my training, and the classical provided that.’
Kathak, as Khan describes it, is ‘a storytelling dance form, predominantly influenced by Hindu mythology, but it also has a huge Persian and Islamic influence.’ As one of its leading proponents, he’s understandably passionate about it, his words stumbling over one another in an attempt to describe what it might look like to a first-timer. He espouses in vast terms, almost oxymoronic on occasion. ‘There’s a huge amount of science behind what’s being done,’ he says at one point, before alluding in the same breath to ‘a sense of spirituality’. Not that the two can’t comfortably sit together, of course, but it takes some brainpower to imagine how it might look on stage.
Thank goodness, then, for YouTube. Even writ small on that tiny screen, Khan is mesmeric – fluid and volatile in his movement. What hits home the most, however, is his skill as a choreographer, as an artist. Zero Degrees, a 2005 collaboration with musician Nitin Sawhney and – somewhat improbably – sculptor Anthony Gormley, is nothing short of powerful. Using a mixture of dance and mimicry, Khan and co manage to pose questions on the very nature of being, all without uttering a single word. It’s this unusual mode of communication, and his fluency in it, that seems to get him out of bed in the morning. He recalls his last visit to Abu Dhabi, performing In-I with Juliette Binoche, as ‘wonderful.’ Again, the words all rush at once as he explains: ‘It felt like a shift had happened in the way people look at dance or theatre, and that excites me. The fact that you’re making a difference somehow. Not just a show, but you’re actually making people think differently.’ Without seeing his performance, you might think this smacks of hyperbole, but Akram Khan – the man who, in Zero Degrees, brought moving pathos to the ‘life’ of a Gormley statue – has the skills to back it up.
It’s not all discipline and sincerity, of course. He is, after all, the man that Kylie Minogue brought in to spice up some of the pumping stage presentations during her last world tour. ‘Oh, Kylie was fun,’ he laughs; ‘just another world, really.’ I wonder aloud whether he’s ever tempted to give age-old kathak a modern twist. ‘Absolutely,’ he says, rightly dismissive. ‘It’s impossible not to.’
What, then, can we expect from Gnosis, his stage show in Abu Dhabi – a collaboration with musicians from our very own House of Oud? ‘I’ve always been fascinated by musicians from that part of the world. I find them very poetic, and spiritual at the same time. [At the moment] I work with Indian musicians, one cellist and one Japanese musician. I’m excited to see what it would add.’
Intrigued? You’re not the only one. ‘With the awards or without the awards, I’m still curious,’ he insists, almost by way of conclusion. ‘I still want to learn.’
Akram Khan performs Gnosis with the House of Oud, Feb 25-26, Abu Dhabi Theatre, Breakwater. Tickets from timeouttickets.com.
