[mukto-mona] Excellent - BD Dancer Akram Khan on his Drama "Desh"

The interview is practically in English for those who dont know Bengali. Check it out.

 

October 7, 2011

Silk Monsoons Cascade Into a Homeland Tale

By ROSLYN SULCAS

New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/08/arts/dance/desh-from-akram-khan-at-sadlers-wells-review.html?pagewanted=print

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSFfEK-2Hew

26 minute interview on DESH with Leesa Gazi

 

LONDON — The ever-present tensions between history and identity, the collective past and the personal present; the paradoxical state of being that is the condition of the second-generation immigrant. These ideas are at the heart of Akram Khan's finest choreography. And "Desh," his first full-length solo work, which opened here at Sadler's Wells on Tuesday, is undoubtedly among the best pieces that Mr. Khan has created.

 

It's a meditation on social identity, a journey to the mythical land of one's ancestors, an evocation of childhood as a place of stories and mystery, and a quest for the self. All of it is permeated by Mr. Khan's fascinating movement style; a boneless, seamless concatenation of interlocking whiplashing curves, his legs sometimes stamping out rhythms drawn from kathak, one of the oldest forms of Indian classical dance.

 

Mr. Khan, born in London to Bangladeshi parents, trained in kathak as a child, and his elegant fusion of the style with contemporary dance first brought him to critical and public attention in the late 1990s. During the past decade he has created a number of large-scale productions that have demonstrated not just his undoubted gifts, but an equal talent for attracting big-name collaborators. Nitin Sawhney, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Sylvie Guillem and Juliette Binoche are among those who have worked with Mr. Khan, some to more successful ends than others.

 

"Desh" (Bengali for "homeland") is constructed with the meticulous eye for visual detail and theatrical effect that is both Mr. Khan's great skill and his Achilles' heel. The design, by Tim Yip, best known for his work on the film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," is as important as the dance here, and it meshes the virtual and the real to startling ends.

 

The piece begins on an almost-bare, dimly lighted stage as Mr. Khan stands behind a mounded metal hump (a manhole? a grave?), then strikes it rhythmically with an ax. A Bangladeshi street scene arrives, brought to evocative life by the shifting bars of vertical light, over which Mr. Khan must jump continuously as he avoids the imaginary cars, bicycles, animals and people evoked by a clamorous soundscape.

 

Later come mesmerizingly beautiful projections, an ever-changing landscape materializing with magical inevitability as a river, trees, birds, even an elephant, flow by as if drawn with white chalk in the wind. At the end, three tiers of silk panels rise and fall, creating a waterfall of gold curtain to hide within, a sculptural incarnation of monsoonlike falling rain, and, at the end, a strange blue-green underwater landscape.

 

The lighting, by Michael Hulls, is as brilliantly realized as the visual design, and Mr. Khan's embodiment of an elderly village cook, and various dialogues — father and child, a tech-support call center — are theatrically skillful, if sometimes overlong. Throughout it all is his inimitable physicality, with its effortless transitions between the horizontal and the vertical, and its lashing, whirling limbs.

 

And yet. Everything feels polished, thought out, angled for the best view. The score, by Jocelyn Pook, is a mélange of songs and chants from different cultures, sometimes effective, but often swellingly sentimental, substituting for emotional content. Mr. Khan, as he moves through his different worlds, never feels like a spontaneous presence.

 

At the end he is wearing his father's long robe. "I'm connected now," he tells tech support. The edges are smoothed, the ends tucked away. "Desh" is art as consolation, and it's almost, but not quite, enough.

 

"Desh" runs through Saturday at the Sadler's Wells Theater in London; sadlerswells.com.

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