It is difficult to take your eyes off Akram Khan and notice anyone or anything else when he is performing. He enters the stage like dynamite rolling into your line of vision, forcing you to hold your breath and count down to the explosion.

In Torobaka, which he staged in Calcutta at Kala Mandir in early October, the Bengali dancer-choreographer has a match in the Spanish dancer Israel Galvan. 

Torobaka starts as a dance-off between classical kathak and flamenco — toro meaning ‘bull’ and vaca meaning ‘cow’ in Spanish — but the head-butting soon turns into a seamless blend of two distinctly different dance styles, with Khan and Galvan working up a frenzy as they simultaneously touch upon their common ground and point of departure.

For Khan, one of the world’s foremost dance artistes, collaborations are a way of creative life. The London-based Akram Khan Dance Company plays with forms and ideas of existence, identity, meaning, but they make sure to take you along on this journey. Which is why even though Torobaka doesn’t have a definite theme like their other productions, it triggers an emotional churning and leaves a packed auditorium shaken and stirred.

Khan views Torobaka as a coming together of two artistes to create “an exchange of classical vocabulary” in kathak and flamenco. 

“Being Bengali... Bangladeshi, it’s very funny because everything we do is sweet, no? When I saw Israel dance I thought, wow, sweet doesn’t belong in his vocabulary. It’s something more animalistic. So we kind of demystified the sacredness of what we do, the classical, the seriousness of it. It’s kind of an absurd humour that we kind of enjoyed exploring,” says Khan, sinking his small, wiry frame into the sofa in an office room at ICCR, a day before his Calcutta show. There’s a bunch of excited dancers milling around in the Sculpture Court for a workshop with him. 

There are boundaries 

What excites him about collaborating with another artiste?

“How you see something is equally important as what you are seeing. Like I would see something through movement, (sculptor) Anish Kapoor would see it as a visual piece of work. I am interested in those different ways of looking at the same thing. Because you learn a lot about yourself also from other people’s perception of you. You are defined by other people, not just by yourself,” Khan says. 

He adds that he only collaborates with geniuses because “I am not”, and a genius would be someone “who dents the pathway of a form”. Which is fairly applicable to him even if he doesn’t agree.

The man seated across the coffee table in a T-shirt, cardigan, navy blue trousers and a baseball cap has been sought out by the likes of Danny Boyle (London Olympics 2012), Kylie Minogue (Showgirl tour) and Juliette Binoche (In-i). His repertoire is marked by dazzling collaborations with people as varied as the musician Nitin Sawhney, writer Hanif Kureishi, art director Tim Yip or ballerina Sylvie Guillem. He received an MBE in 2005 for his services to dance. 

“People may feel... traditionalists may feel I am not a kathak dancer... truly, pure. I don’t know what defines a kathak dancer or what defines a classical dancer,” says Khan after a pause, betraying a niggle of the classical-contemporary conflict, his voice soft but emphatic. 

“In classical, we have boundaries, and those boundaries are given to you by the masters, and each generation shifts those boundaries a little bit further. In contemporary, people assume there are no boundaries. That is where a lot of artistes get it wrong. There are boundaries, and those you have to create yourself. The work that I create has to tell me what it needs and what it doesn’t need,” says Khan, a resident practitioner at University of the Arts London. 

In 2012, he had given the Calcutta audience a glimpse of what he means by shifting the boundaries, with 
Gnosis, a stunning piece where he merged traditional kathak and modern movements. 

“We talk about contemporary like it’s the future, but there is no future without understanding the past. Our roots are based in our culture, in our tradition. We are in a new transition, we are in the digital age. That’s fine, that’s great. But somebody has to still remind our children where we came from. If we don’t, then we belong nowhere. That is worrying me.”

All of us are migrants

When he was growing up in London, Khan’s mother, whom he calls “my agnikanya”, would keep reminding him where he came from. She introduced him to Hindu and Greek mythologies and other religions, put him into kathak at age seven when he started adoring Michael Jackson, and spoke to him only in Bengali till the day he turned 10. “She said to me ‘Happy birthday Akram’ and I said, ‘Ma, you speak English?!’ I think because a lot of her family had died for language (in Bangladesh).” 

When he was about 13, Peter Brook picked him out as Eklavya for the milestone stage production The Mahabharata. “It was epic. I was a child, I was unimportant, but I was experiencing great people,” he says. 

Back home four years later, after touring the world with Brook, Khan felt he didn’t fit in. “There was one year when I struggled a lot with normal society,” he says. After his mother would leave for work, Khan would bunk school and slink off into the garage to practise kathak. The ruse went on for a year till a letter from his school fell into his mother’s hands. “For a 17-year-old, training 10 hours a day, 365 days, it must mean you are a freak of some sort... obsessed. My mother saw that and she said, ‘I will support you’.” He went to De Montfort University in Leicester to study performing arts (dance). 

In 2011, Khan created a “very personal” solo act, Desh, on a budget that he confesses “even does not go into opera houses in the West”. Out of 300 venues around the world, he could only perform at 100. Tim Yip, who won an Oscar for art direction in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, built him a grand backdrop to perform against. “It’s h-u-g-e. I told Tim to make something small, I am only one dancer. He did exactly the opposite. I was terrified, he said we need to be terrified.” 

Desh is a tug at his past. The germ of the idea came from Yip who prodded Khan to go back to his roots. 

“I thought I’ve got to make a solo, and maybe I am getting too old to do that contemporary kind of solo, for an hour and 20 minutes. So I should do it now, my only chance,” says the 41-year-old. “I said, my roots are in Britain. Tim said, no, it’s not. It goes back to Bangladesh, from Bangladesh to East Pakistan and from East Pakistan to India,” says Khan, drawing a long breath.

“It’s really about my father, about identity.... When I was a child, my father was really wanting me to be a Bangladeshi man. And I am like, what the hell is a Bangladeshi man? I have no idea!... All of us are migrants. In the end, your great great grandfather came from somewhere. And that’s very fascinating at this time in Europe. We are in a crisis.... Migration is something I am fascinated by,” he says. 

Last year, he took Desh to Bangladesh, the subject of the piece, and performed it at Shilpakala Academy in Dhaka, where a large part of the set was constructed on site. 

Body speaks back to you

The next project from Akram Khan Dance Company is Until the Lions, based on writer Karthika Nair’s book focusing on the lesser known characters in the Mahabharata. He has chosen the Amba-Shikhandi-Bhishma episode. 

“I feel the women characters are the spine for the whole story (of the Mahabharata) but they are never celebrated and those are the characters I enjoy the most,” he says. 

“It represents a lot about women in today’s generation in a man’s world. Because we are in a man’s world, unfortunately. I realise that through my daughter. The moment she is born, you start thinking through her eyes.

How is she going to deal with this world? It’s a very problematic world we live in. And India is no haven for that, it has a lot of issues. So does Japan. My wife is Japanese and I am learning more about Japan. It’s a very male-dominated culture.” 

Until the Lions is also set on as grand a scale as Desh, designed by Yip. “It’s a very difficult time because I am becoming more ambitious, production-wise, aesthetic-wise. And it does not add up because we are living in a financial crisis all over the world. Not the best time to go big,” admits Khan, who’s looking forward to choreographing rather than performing in the days to come. 

One of the reasons for that is because the “body speaks back to you”. “It just doesn’t take the abuse. I am tired of the body speaking back now. It’s just tiring,” he says, and you sort of see it in his gentle eyes. He is excited about a short film he is preparing to direct. It is based on Desh — the homeland that is never too far from his mind. 
Will he miss performing?

Khan nods ever so slightly. “I enjoy the stage... because I forget the pain. That’s the only time when I am not in pain.”

Akram’s inspirations: 

Michael Jackson 
Bruce Lee 
Muhammad Ali 
Charlie Chaplin 
Buster Keaton 

“I was inspired by them not just for their physical ability or dance or style but by their philosophy.”

 

IN THE AUDIENCE

It was absolutely wonderful to have Akram Khan here for the third time. Whenever we get acts like these, we make sure that we have outreach programmes and educational workshops around these because it is very important that the artiste meets the other artistes in the country… in this case Akram Khan meeting the other dancers or dance students and discussing the techniques. 

— Sujata Sen, director, East India, British Council

I was overwhelmed. I have never seen anything like this. The fluidity of Akram Khan’s performance, the way he was using his body… wow! It was like mathematics on stage where you are trying to get to an end result.... And they had so much command over their body and mind. It’s as if they were meditating while dancing. It was something spiritual happening in front of your eyes. Even the musicians were amazing!

— Swastika Mukherjee, actress

I was sitting there and trying to think my way around the whole concept. There was a moment when Akram Khan was banging his head on the stage… OMG! I also loved how the lights changed. The musicians doing their own bit was also superb. It was a new experience for me

— Anwesha Mukherjee, a student of South City International and Swastika’s daughter