Beth Wood Chats with Internationally acclaimed dancer and choreographer, Akram Khan ahead of his first full-length contemporary dance solo DESH, inspired by his home country of Bangladesh.

Akram Khan Company, DESH © Tim Yip
Beth Wood: DESH is being performed at a clearly poignant time; during the year your homeland of Bangladesh celebrates the 40th anniversary of its independence from Pakistan. How important for you was it to create this piece?
Akram Khan: DESH is significant in many ways. It is my first full-length contemporary solo – I’ve always wanted to create a solo but ended up doing duets and group work, and finally this is the piece where I will be alone on stage all the way. It was also a very different situation in the studio during creation because spending months with only myself in the studio can drive me mad…
 
To create and have its premiere on the 40th anniversary of Bangladesh’s independence has particularly added weight to the piece because it becomes a journey of discovering my own roots, and I am trying to make something of lasting value out of it. The piece talks about my relationship with my father, who is essentially the one who bears the history and past of Bangladesh.
 
Overall it is very challenging creating this piece, not just because it’s a solo, but also ever since the 10-day trip to Bangladesh with my collaborators, we all have been trying to absorb the sights, sounds, smells, colours etc and to recreate our own Bangladesh on stage since then has been a long journey.

Akram Khan Company, DESH © Tim Yip
BW:Clearly there are central messages and themes that the piece explores, what drove this and what if any messages would you like your audience to take away?
AK:The piece comes from a very personal journey, as I said, of discovering my own roots. But it is also very political. If you know Bangladesh, then you will understand the politics behind this country. It is about man versus Mother Nature, and it celebrates the resilience of human spirit in the rhythms of labour, dreams and transformation. In this piece I will be portraying a few characters from Bangladesh, including Nur Hossain, who was the icon in fighting for the independence of the country. I really hope that the audience will be able to get a sense of this extraordinary country by watching the piece.

BW:This is your first full-length contemporary dance solo, what were your decisions for choosing to make a solo for this piece? And on reflection how did this process differ?
AK:I have always been afraid of confronting myself until two years ago, I decided ‘No More!’. I should stop always running away, so I finally committed myself to this solo. This piece is hugely different in terms of process because I have a huge team on board, and I have no other dancers to craft and make the work on, but only on my body. The latter allows me to return to my roots, and by which I meant my own ‘body’. The body is where all our roots lie. Finally, in this project I had to return to my memories a lot since it is part autobiographical. My childhood memories reside somewhere in my subconscious part of my brain. Somehow I feel that my subconscious part creates far more interesting things than my conscious part can ever dream of.

Akram Khan Company, DESH © Tim Yip
BW:What impact has a year of research in both the UK and Bangladesh had on the choreographic journey you undertook?
AK:Firstly, I got to understand and explore Bangladesh and Bangladeshi people in a far more deeper way than before. Secondly, like life, there are no intervals in the work – it shifts from one situation to another at great speed, hence, a sense of disorientation emerges out of this immediate chaos, and the contradictions and flipping from one culture to another has had a strong influence on the way the work is being created and realised.
 
BW:You established the award winning Akram Khan Company in 2000 and have collaborated with some truly wonderful and inspirational artists. Once again the line up of collaborators involved in DESH is impressive, could you tell me a bit about how these relationships first formed and developed?
AK:The artists I work with on DESH are incredible in their own right so I feel very fortunate to be able to work with them.

I met Tim Yip, the visual art director of ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ a few years ago in Beijing, and asked if he perhaps would like to work together some day in the future because I truly admire his work. To my surprise he said ‘yes’ immediately! So now he is the set, costume and visual designer of DESH.

Jocelyn Pook is the composer for DESH. She composed soundtracks for the films ‘Eyes Wide shut’ and ‘Brick Lane’. As much as I connected to the film, it was her music that I was connected to in a very emotional way.  I met her through one of our office team, who had worked with her before and recommended her.

Then Michael Hulls, the lighting designer, is my long-term collaborator. He actually lit my first solo (not full-length though) 11 years ago. I met him through a mutual friend, who is a wonderful choreographer in his own right.

Karthika Nair is a poet and writer. She did a lot of great research on Bangladesh for the team and together we devised and wrote texts based on a few stories related to Bangladesh and the people there. Finally, I have been working closely with Ruth Little in a few projects I had made in the past and she continues to be my dramaturge in DESH. I feel hugely blessed to have her on our team.  Again, she was recommended by a mutual friend.
 

Akram Khan Company, DESH © Tim Yip
BW:When you were growing up, whom and what inspired you and what if any impact has that had on where you are today?
AK:There are so many figures who are important to me when I was growing up. My childhood idol was Michael Jackson. When I see him on TV I’d wanted to dance like him. Working with theatre director Peter Brook when I was young in his work Mahabharata, had also been a very influential path when I was growing up because he has the intelligence of making simple things complex, and the ability to simplify complex things, and many things that he said about art and theatre are still in my mind till now. Finally, Satyajit Ray (Bengali film director) has had a huge impact on how I see time in relation to a scene.
 
DESH premiere’s at the Curve Theatre, Leicester 15 – 18 September before beginning a world tour at Sadler’s Wells, London 4 – 7 October.
http://www.curveonline.co.uk
www.sadlerswells.co.uk