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Akram Khan: Xenos review – his body as a battleground

Sadler’s Wells, London
The influential choreographer’s final solo show is a mythic elegy to India’s war dead

It is surely key to Akram Khan’s magnetism that his first training was in kathak dance, a predominantly solo form in which the dancer must both command the stage and conjure a world into being upon it. While Khan has forged his name as a contemporary dance artist, those qualities still distinguish him as a performer. So it is apt that he begins Xenos – a tribute to the 1.5 million Indians who fought in the first world war – with a kathak scene.

It is one of his best. The stage has been set for an intimate dance recital, with vocalist and percussionist in full swing before Khan – playing a shell-shocked soldier who was once a dancer – crashes in on them as if from another world. He performs a broken solo with all the exactitude, dexterity and fluency we’ve come to expect from him but, in place of kathak’s customary sweep and poise, he pulls all its energies inwards: palms flexed to block the line of motion, hands clamped over mouth, arms stiffening rather than curving into a spin.

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