Akram Khan, the internationally acclaimed dancer and choreographer currently touring Bangladesh with his award-winning solo “Desh” (Homeland), thinks he has a way about himself that resembles more the styles of Michael Jackson and Bruce Lee than a typical kathak dancer. “The way I do kathak isn’t exactly what you’d see in an Indian kathak dancer. My body has the influence of Micheal Jackson, Bruce Lee and Bangladeshi folk dance.”
The 40-year old British dancer of Bangladeshi descent was talking at a panel discussion on “Why are the arts important to developing countries like Bangladesh?” at the British Council-Bangladesh headquarters on Tuesday.
Akram trained in kathak at an early age. The classical dance form owes its origin to India where, he said, dance gurus advise against “releasing it from body.”
“But I am inspired by what Birju Maharaj (a leading Indian dance exponent) said, ‘Everything you are doing is kathak. Maybe its not the way you always expect it to be. You can not out kathak from your body.’”
But how does his production – which, as a dance critic put it, merges the kathak tradition of storytelling with the technical dazzle of Western stagecraft – relate to a Bangladeshi audience? Akram’s was an honest reply. “I have no idea. I guess you have to ask the audience.
For me, the reason behind pursuing arts is personal; I perform to my soul’s satisfaction. If the work goes universal then somehow it will connect. Is it relevant to the people? I don’t know, but I think it will inspire them.”
The discussion then revolved around cultural decadence in the context of Bangladesh. Akram thinks tradition and culture are not unalterable. “I think tradition will change whether we like it or not. My child is half-Japanese and half-Bengali, and I cannot expect him to live for what I do, what I learned from my mother. And talking about the technological aspects, I think my parents’ generation was ‘we’-centric while this generation is all about ‘I’, and hence you have this i-max, i-phone, i-pad, etc. The common denominator is ‘I’.”
Akram also talked about his childhood and the influence he had on himself. “I grew up in a community in London where the children are highly obsessed with education. I had that obsession too, but I was inspired by my mother to look back and connect to my ancestral tradition.”
“Desh” – an eighty-minute production that received favourable reviews internationally before it came to Bangladesh, where Akram earlier said it “belonged” – will be staged today at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy.
