Akram Khan is currently one of the most highly acclaimed British Asian choreographers working in Britain today, and is an Associate Artist at Sadler’s Wells London.  He’s received numerous awards throughout his career, and was awarded an MBE in 2005.  I caught up with him during British Dance Edition, at which he presented a work-in-progress session about his new piece, Vertical Road.

Q: How would you explain or describe Kathak dance to someone who has never seen it before?

AK: Kathak is a North Indian Classical dance form and the word itself means to tell a story, so it’s basically a story-telling dance.

As in all Indian dance, it’s hugely influenced by Hindu mythology, but what’s particular about Kathak is that it has a lot of Islamic influence, so you have this spiritual element from the Hindu and the Islamic culture and traditions.  So, it’s a very mathematical, complex, rhythmical… you know we dance using our bare feet with bells so it’s almost like tap dance, but without the shoes!  Instead of the shoes we have bells.  It’s extremely volatile and exciting to watch, rhythmically, and it has a real sense of sheer speed, but also stillness.  So, it’s really kind of shifting from extreme speed to sudden stillness.  But using this kind of energy and these kinds of rhythmical patterns, in the end it’s about telling stories and we use gestures, hands, particularly the face for more kind of narrative work.

Q: Can you tell me a bit more about Gnosis?

AK: It’s really the first solo work I’ve done in four years.  I kind of got into doing duets for a while, with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Sylvie Guillem and Juliette Binoche.

So, I was very excited to return home, and when I say home I mean my body, because I think our homes exists in our body these days because we’re travelling so much.  And so it was kind of like tracing back to my classical roots, but at the same time I didn’t want to just present classical, because it’s like looking at a painting – when you see a painting and then you move away from it and do other things then you come back.  Because you’ve moved away and experienced something else, by the time you come back you’ve changed and, when you look at the painting again, because you’ve changed you force the way you look at the painting to change.  So, in a way the painting’s evolving, and that’s what happened with my classical from when I did it four years ago to now – I am older now and it makes it harder!  But at the same time I hopefully have grown in other ways, and so it’s really about coming back to my traditional roots.  I wanted to kind of strip away the classical code, so throughout the piece slowly it’s evolving into a journey which leads towards my contemporary.  So I start off as a classical dancer and end up as a contemporary dancer.  That transformation is very important for me.

Gnosis means ‘in the knowledge’ so it’s very much about…actually it’s inspired by Gandhari, who is a mythological female character.  One small reason I wanted to work with her character was because, first of all, women are not explored enough I feel, especially as heroes or heroines in mythological stories – it’s always the male.  And I found her fascinating because she was a very educated women in the Mahabharata, she was extremely powerful and intelligent, and she was forced, let’s say, to marry a blind king.  And because she had to marry this blind king she said “if you are going to give me a blind husband I’ll give you a blind wife”, so she blindfolded herself and she stayed blindfolded.

She gave birth to 100 boys and 1 girl and, through the war of the Mahabharata, most of them died, I think maybe all of them, but the fact that she never took her blindfold off fascinated me.  That she had to hear the stories of how they were killed. That takes a lot of power, and a lot of courage, and a lot of pride in a way.  Because she kept her commitment, in that generation once you uttered it, it was sacred.  In this day and age, a vow is easily adaptable – marriage is a simple example of that.

Catch Akram in Gnosis at Town Hall Birmingham on Friday 7 and Saturday 8 May at 7.30pm.