Skip to main content

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.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2kAXf8W
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more