Akram Khan Company: The Silent Burn Project review – potent tribute to a powerhouse
It’s the 20th anniversary of Akram Khan’s dance company. The moment should have been marked with a celebratory season at Sadler’s Wells featuring Khan’s final solo performance on the London stage. Instead, we have The Silent Burn Project, a collection of films and interviews giving insights into Khan’s work. It’s no substitute for live performance, but a reminder of what an impactful artist Khan has been – without doubt one of the best dancers of the 21st century, but also instrumental in initiating cross-cultural conversations between dance languages, primarily north Indian kathak and western contemporary dance.
Of the three hours of Silent Burn’s online stream, less than 25 minutes is actually dance, just four specially filmed extracts from existing pieces, plus a postscript from Khan. There are five music films, too, ranging from the dextrous vocals and vibrant rhythms of BC Manjunath, sitting on the steps of a Karnataka temple, to the ethereal sound of singer and double bassist Nina Harries on windswept Tottenham Marshes.
The rest delves into what goes on behind the scenes. A chat between Khan and his producer Farooq Chaudhry remembers the hunger and naivety of their early days. Danny Boyle talks about Khan rupturing his achilles tendon in the run-up to the triumphant Olympic opening ceremony. The lengthiest sections are insightful video-call conversations on two of Khan’s abiding themes, otherness and spirituality, with contributors including ballerina Misty Copeland.
The result is to make you want to see more dancing – but it does get you closer to Khan’s endlessly inquisitive creative process, and a section on a young dancers’ workshop gives an inkling of the technical grind Khan demands. (One dancer describes the endless practice as “rigorous and tedious”.)
The dance, brief as it is, is potent nonetheless, and beautifully shot by Lorenzo Levrini. There’s Theo TJ Lowe in a mildly terrifying extract from iTMOi, alternating between manic laughter and head-clutching shakes as we hear God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son. Ching-Ying Chien swoops through a snippet of Until the Lions on the white cliffs of Dover, her power and delicacy caught on camera against the pink-grey wash of sea and sky. And Yen-Ching Lin plants her feet widely on a Taiwanese beach, her back arching almost to the sand, at one with natural forces in a piece from Vertical Road.
The live stream opens with part of Father: Vision of the Floating World, made earlier this year for the centenary of Bangladeshi statesman Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (Mujib), here danced by five dancers next to a London railway bridge. Khan’s trademarks are there: the movement deeply rooted to the earth, channelling its energy; the stealth, strength and precision. The dancers rise in protest. Khan’s intro talks of his tendency to silence in the past. “We must not be silent any more,” he says. Mujib led the drive for Bangladeshi independence in 1971, but it’s no leap to transpose this dance and its uprising to right now.
Father … has a great resolve about it, but Khan’s closing solo has a quieter certainty. He is a dancer of experience now, beard streaked with white; still he lunges low, his hands fly, as his measured voiceover considers seismic change and the necessity to face the past. The future, it seems, is still a place of hope, but it’s all in our hands.
