Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings

Akram Khan’s Bahok

| 261 Akram Khan’s Bahok Blog post, April 24, 2008, dancemagazine.com Akram Khan embodies a contemporary global perspective that has changed the dance landscape in England and beyond. Bahok, like his previous pieces, transformed culture clashes into art. His work is very physical, not at all theoretical. In Bahok, it was the light moments, the humorous miscommunications, that revealed how deeply we are all connected. I’ve done three public interviews with Khan (the one after this performance, at City Center, was the second), and he’s always responded to curiosity with curiosity. He never pontificates; he speaks with discovery in his voice. Bahok, a collaboration between the Akram Khan Company and dancers from the National Ballet of China, exerts a certain spell, and by the end I felt overwhelmed by its beauty and vulnerability. Parallel streams of consciousness , one of talking and the other of dancing, gave us a view into the eight dancers’ lives. The very real situation of a bunch of people from different countries waiting in an airport (or is it a train station?) with frustration, built up aggressions, wanderings, and problems with customs gives rise to both combustion and humor. The dancing followed its own inner rhythm; the talking was mundane or fanciful and led us into delightful cultural confusions . At the “talkback” afterward, which I moderated, Khan said that he likes the word confusion better than fusion because it allows different stories to overlap or intersect. In his work one sees a lightness and a heaviness at the same time, a Western-ness and an Eastern-ness at the same time. One scene in Bahok: a man starts contracting repeatedly in the upper body, like a violent hiccup that won’t stop. Others, in their different languages , try to find out what’s wrong. Finally he utters his first discernible word, “Stuck!” A woman embraces him until his convulsions subside. Another dancer comes to embrace them, and another and another.The last one comes—to dive madly through them. Another scene: a short South Indian man tries to partner a tall Chinese ballet dancer, just managing to dodge her slicing limbs—with hilarious results . During the talkback, Khan spoke about the walls we make in our heads, for instance defining classical ballet or classical Kathak (the form he trained in) while keeping out other influences. He told us that when, as a child, he asked why Kathak dancers wear bells on their ankles, the answer he got 262 | Through the Eyes of a Dancer was: because your teacher does, and his teacher did, and so on. Khan asks questions—of himself, of the theater, of the cultural attitudes we all carry in our bodies. The word bahok is Bengali for “carrier.” He also talked about the terrorist bombing in London in 2005, and how he wasn’t really aware of the brown color of his skin until that moment. He had many stories, and the dancers onstage had many stories that made you want to know them better. I don’t think I have ever seen a dance-and-talking piece that was so full of humanity, wit, and vulnerability. ...