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Magazine
PERFORMANCE
New idioms
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Combining contemporary dance and Kathak, Akram Khan and his dancers carve a new vocabulary of the body with `Kaash', comments UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA.
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It is important that we remind ourselves of the value of that which we cannot touch. Is it not true that the empty space inside the cup is what renders it useful? Similarly, the stillness between steps, the spaces between musical phrases, and the empty spaces in space itself contain all the mysteries of their eventual forms.
AND thus begins "Kaash", a contemporary dance and Kathak meditation that dwells, in the course of its hour-long performance, as much on the nature of stillness and silence as on movement and music.
At the Jamshed Bhabha Theatre in Mumbai, the large black rectangular backdrop onstage, reminiscent of Rothko, comes alive in deeply glowing crimson. It fades to a deep grey, and then begins to glow a deep ember-red again. In Anish Kapoor's breathtaking set design, the large black rectangle of the backdrop first comes slowly alive with light and then darkens again, though it will never disappear, suggesting that even in nothingness, there is everything; and that everything is all around.
On the stage, a black-clad figure, facing away from the audience and looking at the dark rectangle of the backdrop, begins the performance. The figure stands still, and the pre-performance conversation of the Jamshed Bhabha audience falls to a hush. The figure, still motionless, continues to look away. Stillness, and silence. After several long, calming moments, another figure walks up to whisper something to the one already on stage. Then, darkness, and the performance begins.
"Kaash", presented in India by The British Council and HSBC, is an hour-long contemporary dance and Kathak performance choreographed by the London-based Royal Festival Hall Associate Akram Khan and performed by his dance troupe. Against Kapoor's set design, which is complemented by Aideen Malone's lighting, and performing to an overwhelming musical score composed by Nitin Sawhney (with additional music in the form of "Spectre" by John Oswold, played by The Kronos Quartet), the lunging, leaping dancers bring together several powerful and philosophical elements in their performance, ranging from black holes and time cycles to the great dance of creation and destruction, the dance of Shiva. Warmth and cold, stillness and motion, silence and sound, fullness and emptiness — one is not possible without the other, say the dancing figures.
"Kaash', which means "if", is a fusion of the severity and spareness of contemporary dance on the one hand, and the classical beauty and grace of Kathak. In attempting such a fusion, the dancers carve out a new vocabulary of the body, as they question space with their slicing, swaying, slashing, electrifying movements. At moments, they have the coiled energy of the martial arts; at other moments, the sensuousness of lovers.
Nitin Sawhney's music and Anish Kapoor's set design also come together with great beauty and effect in this seamless composition. Sawhney's music ebbs and flows around them, now whispering, now throbbing, the tables thudding feverishly as the dancers writhe and leap, framed against the red sun of the backdrop that glows hot, fades, then glows again.
The five-member team of performers — Moya Michael, Shanell Winlock, Inn-Pang Ooi, Eulalia Ayguage Farro, and Khan himself — is a mix of nationalities, including South East Asian, South African and Spanish, while Khan himself is of Bangladeshi origin. Khan, born in London to Bangladeshi parents, studied Kathak at the Indian Academy of Dance before going on to study contemporary dance. He has worked with Pandit Ravi Shankar in "The Jungle Book", and with Peter Brook on "The Mahabharata". Both works explored the interface between two cultures. With `Kaash', he has gone further in this exploration, and has brought it into the 21st century.
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