The FNB Dance Umbrella is a collision of vastly different universes. No other South African festival provides such a meeting place between the avant-garde and the traditional, the barefooted and the technological.
The headline act this year is ambitious in its combination of disciplines. Acclaimed United Kingdom-based choreopgrapher Akram Khan opens the festival with Ma. It’s an integration of dance, text and live music in which 10 multinational performers ‘explore issues around motherhood and the fragile connection between people and their land”.
The work had its world premiere in Singapore last May and it has been touring ever since. No wonder this interview with Khan, one of the most prodigious young choreographers in international dance today, was done on the phone from Sydney.
Khan (30) was born in London, the son of Bangladeshi parents. ‘In our house, my mother listened to Louis Armstrong. On the other side of the room, my father watched Indian movies. Right in the middle, I was trying to copy Michael Jackson.” His mother encouraged him to start dancing at the age of seven. He was trained in kathak, the classical genre of north India. Originating in the 16th century as a Hindu ritual performed in temples, kathak means storytelling in Sanskrit. It also means a lot for Khan’s future aspirations.
‘My mother did not want me to forget her culture. I am grateful for this, because I believe that dance is a way of discovering a culture.” Khan grew up speaking Bengali at home. As a teenager he performed in the theatrical epic Mahabharata, created by internationally acclaimed director Peter Brook. After his graduation from the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in the UK, he launched the Akram Khan Company in 2000.
His unique dance language is often described as contemporary kathak. ‘I can’t call it contemporary kathak anymore. And I don’t like the term ‘fusion’ of kathak and contemporary dance either. I call my style ‘confusion’, because my body got confused. I studied kathak for many years with my guru Sri Pratap Pawar and only much later went to university to learn contemporary dance. So, my body was trained in two very different aesthetics, and it started to make its own decisions.”
Ma is Khan’s second full-length work and it arrives at the Dance Umbrella direct from the Sydney Opera House and Perth Festival in Australia. In Bengali, Ma is the word for both earth and mother. According to Khan, the show is loosely inspired by Arundhati Roy’s essays about Indian farmers being evicted from their land: ‘I was fascinated by how the book made me aware that there is a very deep spiritual relationship between farmers and their land, how they are dependent on it, as a child on its mother.”
The other inspiration for Ma was Quentin Tarantino’s movie Kill Bill. ‘For me, the film is full of unpredictability, it has no sense of development. Tarantino creates an intriguing chaos, which has its own inner logic.” Khan is a devoted film fan.
In our conversation, we return to the diverse Akram Khan Company, which is about to celebrate its fifth year. It includes dancers from Malaysia, Spain, South Africa and Slovakia. In Ma, there are also three musicians, born in Pakistan, India and England. It is co- created by the Italian composer Riccardo Nova. Other creators include artists of different origins: a Finnish lighting designer, Peruvian dramaturg, British costume designer, Italian technical manager, Finnish sound engineer, German rehearsal director and a Pakistan-born producer. Additional music was recorded by the Ictus Ensemble, a Brussels-based contemporary-music group. The acclaimed writer Hanif Kureishi wrote the text of the work.
Surprisingly, Khan does not consider this strong cosmopolitan aspect as important. ‘It’s what we do that matters, not where we come from. People see my company as multinational and multicultural, but I chose my dancers because I saw them performing. It’s as simple as that. My colleagues are important for me as individuals. I chose them because of what they have to say, and how they want to say it.”
Khan’s company includes two South African women. The Johannesburg-born Moya Michael, who is one of the founding members of his group, was named the Standard Bank Young Artist for Dance in 2003. Shanell Winlock also began her professional dance training in Johannesburg, and during her collaboration with George Vuyani Maqoma won various awards. She joined Khan’s troupe in 2002 and Ma is her third production with the company. Prior to their work with Khan, both talented South African exports were awarded prestigious scholarships to study dance in Brussels.
‘I find them exceptional in all respects: as performers, as dancers, as people. Both of them have very different qualities, and both are very easy to work with. One of the most interesting things about them was when I asked how they felt about the apartheid past they lived in, both reacted: ‘Let’s get on with life.’ They simply said that South Africa has moved on. They refuse to live with the heaviness of the past; they know that this is a new beginning. I don’t know if this is true for all South Africans, but the fact that they both adapted extremely quickly was surprising for me. As an outsider, I admire that.”
At the end of our conversation, he humbly announces: ‘Me and Shanell Winlock are getting married this July. We definitely want to have two weddings. One here in Johannesburg, a traditional one, and one in London, an Indian one.”
So, perhaps Khan is not so confused after all!
The details
The FNB Dance Umbrella takes place at The Wits Theatre and other venues until March 19.
Catch Akram Khan at the Dance Factory in Newtown on February 23 and 24 and at Durban’s Playhouse Theatre on February 26.
More info: Tel: (011) 482 4140 / (031) 369 9444