Akram Khan

Dancing New Interculturalism

Royona Mitra

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137393661
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Through seven key case studies from Khan's oeuvre, this book demonstrates how Akram Khan's 'new interculturalism' is a challenge to the 1980s western 'intercultural theatre' project, as a more nuanced and embodied approach to representing Othernesses, from his own position of the Other.

1

Khan’s Body-of-Action

As a London-based second-generation British-Bangladeshi with training in multiple performance vocabularies that permeate every aspect of his aesthetic, it would be reductive, even impossible, to engage with Khan’s art without understanding the embodied reality and the socio-political contexts that catalyse it. Sondra Horton Fraleigh reminds us of the fundamental link between a dancer’s lived reality and their art:

Because dance is in essence an embodied art, the body is the lived (experiential) ground of the dance aesthetic. Both dancer and audience experience dance through its lived attributes – its kinaesthetic and existential character. Dance is the art that intentionally isolates and reveals the aesthetic qualities of the human body-of-action and its vital life. (Fraleigh xiii)

To understand the kinaesthetic qualities of Khan’s art requires an engagement with his dance vocabulary drawn from kathak and contemporary dance idioms. Moreover his embodiment of eclectic movement languages is nuanced further by his own biographical circumstances and his interactions with the wider field of British South Asian arts. Together they generate complex affiliations to diverse traditions, cultures, nations and histories. It is this processual intersection between his biography and his art that lends Khan’s vital life its charge, and infiltrates his new interculturalism with a spirit of ‘self-knowledge’, evoking identity not as a fixed inherited entity, but as an ongoing exploration of its incomplete and multi-layered constructions (Fraleigh xxii).

This chapter begins with a summary of Khan’s early years in 1970s London as the son of first-generation Bangladeshi immigrants in an environment rife with racial tensions between the white native population and non-white immigrant communities. It then examines his training in kathak with particular emphasis on his learning of the South Asian dramaturgical principles of abhinaya and rasa. A close scrutiny of Khan’s training in an eclectic range of Western movement languages follows, focusing on the physiological and creative tensions these created in his body in relation to his kathak training. The chapter goes on to isolate Khan’s interactions with the genre of physical theatre as I believe its interdisciplinarity between dance and theatre and its embodied self-referentiality has had a profound impact on shaping Khan’s emerging language of ‘confusion’. An analysis of this aesthetic of ‘confusion’ follows to examine the processes through which his body organically began to make decisions for itself, resulting in the creation of Akram Khan Company in 2000 with producer Farooq Chaudhry. And finally, I examine the links between Akram Khan Company and the wider field of British South Asian arts in order to frame Khan’s new interculturalism in relation to the artistic interventions of his senior and contemporary South Asian colleagues in literature, visual arts, music and dance.

Khan’s early years¹

Akram Khan was born in 1974 in London to Bangladeshi parents Mosharaf Hossain Khan and Anwara Khan. His father came to Britain in 1969 to study cost and management accountancy, and his mother joined him in 1973 after finishing her MA in Bengali literature in Dhaka, two years after Bangladesh gained independence as a nation in 1971. Bangladesh was once the same as Bengal and a part of the land mass of eastern India. In 1905 the Partition of Bengal segregated a group of people bound by a common culture and language on the premise of religion. From this the geographical boundaries of West Bengal and East Bengal were born, becoming home to the Hindu and Muslim populations of Bengal respectively. This geographical boundary became a political one when East Bengal became East Pakistan with the Partition of India in 1947. The seat of power of the newly formed nation of Pakistan lay largely with West Pakistan (the modern-day nation of Pakistan), an area separated linguistically and geographically from East Pakistan by the nation of India in the middle. Over the next two decades East Pakistan was perceived to be exploited financially and its Bengali language and culture were seemingly marginalised by West Pakistani authorities. This gradually led to a political and cultural revolt in East Pakistan in 1971, as it declared itself as the independent state of Bangladesh. Eventually, following a war of independence in 1971, the nation of Bangladesh was born. The Khan family’s arrival into Britain very shortly after Bangladesh gained independence meant they brought with them the strong sense of Bengali cultural identity that the newly founded nation had been fighting for.²

Khan’s parents were atypical of post-Second World War South Asian immigrants on two counts. Firstly, as per the pervasive post-war narrative, while most South Asian immigrants arrived in Britain in the 1950s as part of ‘migration of labour’ from Britain’s ex-colonies, the Khans arrived approximately two decades later (Brah, ‘Asian in Britain’ 36). Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Khan’s father came to Britain not as an economic migrant but as a student. These two factors alongside Anwara Khan’s postgraduate level education were influential in lending the Khan family greater social mobility within their diasporic community. However, even as Khan’s parents were part of a slightly different social milieu to the immigrants of the post-war narrative, they arrived into a Britain that was rife with racial tension between the white native British and the non-white immigrant populations. It was under these hostile circumstances that the Khans began their immigrant project of creating a home away from the homeland.

The exclusion enforced upon and experienced by these first-generation South Asians ghettoised them into closed communities of their own. Anwara Khan retrospectively realises that her initial joy of joining her husband in Britain was overshadowed by the difficulties she encountered in trying to make a home in a new environment where the language barrier was what she found the most alien (An. Khan, Interview). Akram Khan recognises that in order to counter the hostilities in their host country, his parents and their other Bengali friends ‘formed their own community and then they locked themselves in it through memory [...] and then they held onto this memory defiantly’ (Ak. Khan, Interview 1).

To compensate for their dislocation from the homeland, the Khan family home became the space where their home culture was preserved so that the children did not lose sight of their cultural heritage. Therefore, as Khan recollects:

there was an insistence on speaking Bengali at home, eating ethnic cuisine, and wearing traditional clothes at social functions, in order to keep the bonds with their homeland alive. (Ak. Khan, Interview 1)

This transmission of home culture became largely the project of female immigrants whose identification with the motherland and her traditions were vital to every migrant’s reality, and Anwara Khan was one of many such women (Werbner 905). Having left Bangladesh very shortly after it gained independence and long before the Bangladeshi nationalist project prioritised Islamic identity over Bengali customs, Khan’s mother embraced a Bangladeshi culture that was a syncretic expression of Bengali social customs and Islamic religious practices (Kabeer 38). It is this very syncretic Bengali identity that she transmitted to her British-born children, alongside investing heavily in the value of British education. The Khans realised the upward social mobility attached to the latter and aspired to have both Khan and his sister attend private school. While his sister did achieve this, Khan admits that ‘I just never got in. I tried all of them. I didn’t get in’ (Ak. Khan qtd in Patterson). Thus, from a young age, Khan’s complex identity evolved at the intersections of British education in the public domain and Bengali culture in the private sphere.

We observe a similar openness to cultures and people in Anwara Khan’s anecdotes about her son learning Bangladeshi folk dance from the age of three while being simultaneously fascinated by the choreography of the late Michael Jackson. In an obituary for the Guardian on the untimely demise of the influential African-American pop star, Khan reminisces:

If Michael Jackson hadn’t been there, I don’t know if I would have been a dancer. He was the first person I connected with. I remember when I saw Thriller, I was terrified. I’d never seen anything so frightening in my life, but it was also incredibly exciting. It had everything – music, storytelling, dance. (Ak. Khan qtd in Saner)

Khan goes on to say that as a young boy he was bullied within his Bangladeshi community for his fascination with the effeminate discipline of dance. But once he began to render Jackson’s Thriller routines at local discos and started winning competitions he gained kudos. In retrospect Khan acknowledges his admiration for Jackson’s ability to marry popular culture and dance and proposes that this ‘changed everything’ by removing the stigma attached to the male dancing body (Ak. Khan qtd in Saner). He recognises that his mother was as encouraging when it came to him learning Bangladeshi folk dance as she was of his obsession with Michael Jackson. At a time when his contemporaries were struggling to do so, Khan cites his mother’s openness to other cultures as the reason he was able to negotiate his own identity-politics with relative ease. Consciously diluting the politically constructed national differences between Bangladeshi Bengali identity and Indian Bengali identity, Anwara Khan transmitted to her children a Bengali identity that drew holistically upon the shared cultural histories of these nations (An. Khan, Interview). Moreover Khan experienced trans-ethnic affiliations while growing up alongside Indian, Pakistani, Chinese and African children, which obscured ‘discrete national belongings and even religious identity’ within the diaspora (Werbner 900).

His curiosity for cultural dialogue was further honed when from 1985 to 1989 Khan performed as the Boy (in the theatre version) and Ekalavya (in the film version) in Brook’s production of The Mahabharata. His early exposure to Brook’s performance-making instilled in Khan a quest for the ‘most distilled, simple and minimalist artistic approaches to telling the most complex stories’ (Ak. Khan, Interview 2). Despite sustaining their tightly knit Bengali community life in Britain, Khan’s parents were thus unique in ensuring that alongside nurturing his appreciation and understanding of Bengali culture, Khan’s childhood was also immersed in engendering a respect for trans-ethnic interactions and intercultural dialogue. This was reflected in Anwara Khan’s keenness for Khan to not only perform Bengali folk dance but to formalise his dance training through enrolling him in kathak classes. Consequently, at the age of seven a Muslim Bangladeshi Khan enrolled at the National Academy of Indian Dance (NAID) in London to train in kathak under the tutelage of the Hindu Indian maestro Sri Pratap Pawar. Thus, in kathak’s syncretic, chequered and trans-ethnic history, which merges Hindu and Islamic performance traditions (as already discussed in the Introduction), Khan’s own multi-ethnic identity and intercultural perspectives were rather appropriately reflected and nurtured.

Khan’s training in kathak, abhinaya and rasa

While it is true that referring to Khan’s art as ‘contemporary kathak’ is indeed a reductive approach, the core dramaturgical principles of kathak’s emotive storytelling are pivotal to his unique aesthetic, and characterise his new interculturalism in integral ways. Therefore an understanding of these dramaturgical principles is vital here. Post-classicisation in the mid twentieth century, kathak has come to be governed by the three components of Indian dramaturgy: natya (theatricality), nritta (technical virtuosity) and nritya (sentiments and mood evoked in movement). A typical recital of kathak always embodies all these three components in equally adept measure. Central to its complex movement language is the emotional expressivity and narrative drive of the natya and nritya components of the dance, delivered through the strictly codified corporeal system of signification known as abhinaya. This stylised and mimetic storytelling feature of kathak, and indeed all Indian classical dance forms, conveys characterisations, themes and narratives through a codified language that synthesises mudras (hand gestures) and facial expressions in order to evoke the nine universal human emotions as laid out in the Natyashastra. They are sringaram (love), hasyam (laughter), raudram (fury), karunyam (compassion), bibhatsam (disgust), bhayankaram (horror), viram (heroism), adbhutam (wonder) and shantam (peace). These primary human emotions are abstracted, codified and articulated through strictly stylised physical gestures and facial expressions to create the language of abhinaya, thus evoking a marriage between movement and theatricality. And it is the signification achieved through abhinaya that evokes in kathak and other Indian classical dance forms the potential of the ancient Indian philosophy and principle of rasa.

In the Natyashastra, rasa theory is theorised as a conceptual framework for the relationship between art (across multiple disciplines) and its reception. The word rasa in Sanskrit means juice, or the flavourful extract derived from ingesting a fruit or any kind of cuisine. In using the term rasa in the context of the reception of art, a parallel is thus evoked in the Natyashastra, between the consumption of food and the reception of art. The physical and emotional satisfaction that can be derived from a flavourful meal is thus compared to the ‘aesthetic delight – a state of joy characterized by emotional plenitude’ that can accompany an immersive encounter with a piece of art (Meduri 3). Dance scholar Kapila Vatsyayan views rasa as a psycho-somatic system that channels the correspondence of emotional energy between the motor and the sensory systems of performer and audience. She reminds us that the relationship between the physical and the psycho-emotional is fundamentally interactive, as ‘the psychical manifests itself in the physical and the physical can evoke the psychical’ (Vatsyayan 19). In the physical codifications of rasa theory, the nine basic emotions are abstracted and stylised through abhinaya into ‘primary moods, sentiments, primary emotive states’ (Vatsyayan 64). Vatsyayan writes that while the performer is able to depict the nine basic human emotions through being skilled in abhinaya, it is the audience’s ability to recognise and identify these emotions that generates rasa, and through it an ideological transactional exchange transpires between the art, the artist and its receptor.

According to rasa theory, this contemplative awareness that is evoked in the audience is also an impersonal state that prevents the audience from experiencing complete empathy with the performer and creates the sahrdaya or the ‘initiated spectator, one of attuned heart’ (Vatsyayan 155):

The sahrdaya (sympathetic spectator) sympathises (hrdayasamvada) with the original character, and to a large degree he even identifies (tanmayibhava) with the situation depicted. But he does not identify completely; he retains a certain aesthetic distance, the name for which is rasa. (Masson and Patwardhan qtd in Mason 76)

Rasa thus generates an emotional and spiritual state in which the audience is simultaneously critically distanced yet fundamentally connected to the performance they are experiencing. This split consciousness in the audience emphasises that rasa relies on channelling the emotive qualities of a performance between an art and its recipient instead of focusing on its formalist aspects alone.

Kathak’s reliance on the modality of abhinaya therefore makes it a form that renders meaning in motion, evoking a stylised human reality on stage. Furthermore this codified theatricality is only accessible to initiated audiences who are versed in the stylised rendition of the nine human emotions and are therefore able to experience rasa through it. In learning the language of kathak, Khan therefore trained in rendering abhinaya and its embodied marriage between theatricality and movement. He does admit, however, that he was ‘always very bad at performing abhinaya’ (Ak. Khan, Interview 2):

I think this is because I always felt restrained and frustrated by the codified requirements of performing a particular character and their emotions in ways that have already been predetermined. (Ak. Khan, Interview 2)

Despite feeling distanced from the codified nature of abhinaya, Khan embodied dance as a simultaneously kinaesthetic and expressive art form, and this smooth slippage between movement, theatre, dance and acting began to mature in Khan’s practice from a very young age. Finally and perhaps most significantly, Khan understood the philosophy of rasa as a critical and aesthetic distancing device through which his audiences could attain a heightened state of contemplation without fully empathising with the subject of their art. It is important to note here that Khan’s early understandings and embodiment of both abhinaya and rasa were to become influential strategies in the generation of his own aesthetic of new interculturalism, and in the following case-stu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Images
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Khan’s Body-of-Action
• 2 Corporeal Gestures in Gnosis (2010)
• 3 Auto-ethnography and Loose in Flight (1999)
• 4 Third Space Politics in Zero Degrees (2005) and Desh (2011)
• 5 Mobility and Flexibility in Bahok (2008)
• 6 Queering Normativity in iTMOi (2013)
• Conclusion
• Appendix: List of Performances
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plate