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ARTS Recently, the Akram Khan Company from the UK visited India as part of a six-city tour of the Park’s New Festival, curated by the Prakriti Foundation in Chennai. When Farooq Chaudhry, producer, manager and co-founder of the Akram Khan Company was asked how he would best define the work his company does, he said, “I hate this question because I have to look for a superficial label. But if I have to go down this road, I would say, intercultural and interdisciplinary storytelling. Doesn’t that sound horrible and pretentious?” In a way, Farooq was echoing a recurring sentiment felt by contemporary dancers everywhere. Contemporary dance, after all, is a multi-layered genre, open to definition and interpretation. Born in London and Bangladeshi by origin, Akram Khan studied kathak under his Guru, Sri Pratap Pawar. By the late 1990s, he was presenting solo performances, and also developing a more modern outlook towards his dance. But it appears that his classical training in kathak continues to inspire his modern and contemporary work. The first half of the evening, which preceded the performance of his production, Gnosis at the Park’s New Festival, was a tribute to his classical roots. Gnosis stages moments in the lives of two complex characters from the Mahabharata — Gandhari and her first-born, Duryodhana — and can aptly be described as dance-theatre. It is a short piece but it takes on an interesting form, akin to the manner in which opponents in traditional martial arts counter each other; except here, the relationship between the mother and the son is an emotional battle against fate, playful and brutal, at once. Enhanced greatly by Fabiana Piccioli’s superb light design, the production’s choreography by its lead artistic director and dancer, Akram Khan, is designed in neat symmetry — precise, and yet rippling with drama; Gandhari’s staff, providing plenty of possibilities with movement.
Collaborating with Akram Khan is Taiwanese dancer-choreographer, Fang-Yi Sheu. She performs Gandhari with the dignity of a woman who has deliberately blindfolded herself, and in spite of her great love for her son, sees his follies, tries to mend his wayward ways but must ultimately abide by her conscience. It is possible that aficionados of kathak may debate the essence of the classical form and its interpretation by Akram Khan, but there is no denying that the entire show on display, from the beginning to the post-interval Gnosis, was impressive and touched by an intelligent ethos.
Gnosis stages moments in the lives of two complex characters from the Mahabharata — Gandhari and her first-born, Duryodhana — and can aptly be described as dance-theatre
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The Akram Khan Company, founded in 1999, is today one of the leading companies of contemporary dance. Farooq Chaudhry, who was retiring as a dancer at that time, found a younger and relatively unknown Akram Khan display a kind of dance that he said he had never seen before. Akram Khan, in his words again, “seemed to effortlessly embody two worlds — the two worlds that I myself as an Asian living in Britain had been trying to negotiate through my personal and professional life.”
