 |
   |
Akram KhanOctober 2002 London, Queen Elizabeth Hall by Catherine Hale |
|||||||
|
A single gunshot of light; the apparition of Kahn, beautiful as the day in a white tunic – the opening to Loose in Flight, the first work in this bill, was dazzling. And Khan was right to create a fanfare. At just 28 he is honoured with a Dance Umbrella retrospective of his choreographic career in kathak-influenced contemporary dance, which is as short as it is brilliant. In less than three years he’s exhausted all the critics’ superlatives. So this chronologically ordered programme, charting his ascendancy from promising young graduate to Dance Umbrella’s professed darling, was a good opportunity scrutinise the record. No that there was much to find fault with. With his solo Loose in Flight, (first performed in 2000), his arms wove a spell over the dance world, their snake-like, kathak, tension exploding into a liquid eloquence all his own. Its dangerous coiled energy is balanced by Kahn’s cool aplomb. The self-containment in space is broken only by the heart-stopping speed of those, now legendary, spins that the mind can barely register. He arrived with a bang, but was this a flash of virtuoso genius or a choreographer in the making? Rush proved the latter, consolidating charisma into a language with two other dancers who, to their credit, are hot on his heels with dexterity and whip-cracking force. An elemental, ship’s engine of a soundtrack is the driving force for this study into the knife-edge between hovering stillness and mesmerising velocity. And it turns out Kahn, the young gun, is really an academician. His mastery in using the body to draw polyrhythms in space, sometimes so fast the arms leave a beautifully tailing arc behind them, reminds me of Balanchine. And as the dancers’ arms splice the air like a wind farm in a gale they move always in precise constellations on the stage. But as sound turned into the metronomic pulse of a dripping tap I wanted release: from the incessant pendulum-motion, from the grave aura of precision; and for the dancers imprisoned in their own orbit. (Kahn clearly doesn’t do interpersonal relationships.) After a while the enigma turned cold. And so Related Rocks, although undoubtedly his most sophisticated work, suffered from creeping monotony by the end of the evening. Same costumes as Rush (aikido-master-hits-catwalk black tunics); same garrulous arms. There was a more dreamy mood as the five dancers take their place among gurgling glockenspiel (I think), shimmering cymbals and plink-plonk piano each clambering for prominence in Magnus Lindberg’s specially commissioned score, and hints of an impish undercurrent to the dance. There were flashes of mutual acknowledgement among the performers, a moment of thrilling proximity between Kahn and another dancer, but the drama dissipated into the now safe terrain of his dazzling bodily equations.
Even so, if his precocious talent needs to mellow with humanity a little, it is no less impressive for that.
|
||||||||
|
 |
||||||||
|
|
||||||||
|
|
||||||||
|
|
||||||||
|
|
||||||||
