Ma,
choreographed by Akram Khan.
Lincoln Center, New York,
April 2006.
“Let me tell you a story.” That inviting phrase, a casual version of Once Upon A Time, could serve as the start of a novel or a film or a one-man show, could be replaced by any number of phrases the tone of which indicates the same thing, and it would set up the same expectations. In Ma, the 2004 dance by the British sensation Akram Khan (which received its American premiere at Lincoln Center in April), the phrase comes out of the mouth of the choreographer himself, fully halfway into the seventy-five-minute work. For a long while after that, he doesn’t say anything else.
In the silence, two other dancers engage in an enigmatic duet that looks a little like a stylized domestic scuffle: the woman pinioned in the man’s arms, pushing off his embrace, again and again. An Indian drum starts playing. A cello. More dancers join in, a writhing mass of bodies, one body suddenly riding on top of the others. After ten or fifteen minutes, Khan speaks up again, repeating the phrase, then describing the times he —a child born and raised in London—used to visit his mother’s village in Bangladesh. Troubled by questions his mother didn’t have time to answer, he would hang upside down from a tree, hoping the questions would fall from his head to the ground, hoping the earth would answer. He says it did.
The tale seems to illuminate many of the visual images that have come before: the singer hanging upside down, the dancers so often balanced on their heads, one leg extended skyward or both legs spread in a V-shape, touching the earth on tiptoe. It also seems to correspond with a fable told at the beginning by two women in the head-down, one-leg-up posture: a barren woman, asking the gods for children, is told to plant seeds. When trees grow from those seeds, the woman—still barren—is told that the trees are her children, since the love she feels for them is a mother’s love. The story also mentions the origin legend of the baobab tree, replanted upside down by the gods as punishment for constantly asking to be like other trees. Add to this the knowledge, gleaned from the program notes, that the word Ma means both earth and mother in Hindi, and some kind of meaning, if not quite a story, begins to emerge.
Much more interesting than these spoken texts, though, is what happens in between and around them: some of the most thrilling movement to be found on any stage today. Khan and his international ensemble have been compared to swords, scythes, and rotary blades. What these descriptions try to capture is, most of all, speed—unbelievable speed—at no cost of precision, no loss of sharpness. Khan’s whirlwind technique —lunging, dropping to the floor—also reminds many people of the martial arts, particularly the liquid, lyrical magic of films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. His is the kind of art that summons seeming opposites brought into equilibrium: weighted yet quicksilver, meticulous yet sensuous, graceful yet percussive. Or, as he himself characterizes it, “the stillness within the extreme speed,” “the clarity within the chaos.”
This astonishing technique goes a long way toward explaining why Khan, at thirty-two, has become one of the most fêted and sought-after dancer-choreographers on the international scene. Ma, only his second evening-length work, was co-produced by Lincoln Center, London’s South Bank Centre, Paris’s Theatre de la Ville, Dusseldorf’s Tanzhaus NRW, Ghent’s Arts Centre Voorhuit, The Holland Festival, The Göteborg Dance and Theatre Festival, and the Singapore Arts Festival, where it premiered. Before it made it to New York, it went to Rome, Seoul, Munich, Stockholm, Taipei, Copenhagen, Vienna, and Edinburgh. But there’s another reason why he has more opportunities than he can possibly use. It lies in the story of where that technique came from, the story that the text in Ma alludes to but that really gets told in the dancing and the music, the story of Akram Khan, Anglo-Asian.
It all started with his mother. Growing up in Bangladesh, she had longed to dance but was forbidden to perform. Around 1970, she and her husband moved to London to further their educations. When Akram was born, she taught him folk dances, hoping thereby to keep him connected to Bangladesh the way she did by speaking Bengali at home. When he was seven, she took him to Sri Pratap Pawar, a renowned London guru of Kathak, the classical dance form of North India. Thus young Khan became a disciple in a long and rigorous tradition, passed down person to person. At the same early age, he was infatuated with Michael Jackson and exposed to mixes of East and West, touring with The Adventures of Mowgli when he was ten, spending two years with Peter Brook’s production of The Mahabharata.
When Khan was eighteen, his guru presented him formally in his first solo recital. As far as the guru was concerned, Khan had graduated. As far as Khan’s extended family was concerned, he still needed to get a college degree. So off to college he went, thinking he could satisfy them with a degree in dance. Yet because the South Asian dance courses on offer looked remedial to him, he enrolled in contemporary dance, which he had never seen before. In the story he would soon be telling to reporter after reporter, this exposure is the first turning point. What he saw shocked and fascinated him, but he went about mastering it, transferring to the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, where he graduated (again) with the highest honors ever awarded a performing-arts degree.
Such success was confusing. Was he a Kathak dancer or a contemporary dancer? His guru had given him a discipline; his university studies had given him the freedom to question it. And the problem wasn’t only mental. His body—that repository of tradition—was also confused; it didn’t move like the bodies of the other dancers because it knew different things. Khan decided to listen to it, and in a series of solos he began to develop that rarest of things in dance: a new language, a new way of moving, clarity out of chaos.
The next turning point came when Khan won a grant to work at the Brussels school of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, the hub of contemporary European dance. There he was able to experiment on other dancers, trying to transfer his movement style onto other bodies. This is a crucial step in the development of any choreographer—stepping out of the dance, viewing it with the objectivity of a spectator. Since Kathak is a solo art, Khan’s work with an ensemble was also another break with tradition, and since the dancers had no Kathak training and not enough time to learn as he did, Khan had to reinvent it, selecting the parts he needed, finding his own path.
The results found immediate acclaim, and the raves and the awards and the commissions started to pile up. It’s easy to see why. The work wasn’t just dazzling and original; it was multicultural. Even better, it was organic. Unlike most cross-cultural mixings, Khan’s wasn’t the forced result of an intellectual decision. It was an accident of the body — confusion, he insisted, not fusion. And it doesn’t hurt that Kathak itself is a cross of Hindi and Muslim cultures, an accident of history. Multicultural is who Khan is.
But there’s more to Khan’s appeal than that. As much as the differences between Kathak and contemporary dance gave Khan trouble, there are correspondences. Kathak, he has explained, embraces imperfection, embodying Krishna, the most imperfect, human-like god. “It is about mistakes and showing how beautiful these mistakes can be.” This attitude matches up nicely with the informal, pedestrian realism of much contemporary dance, the way the dancers often just walk on or off stage. In Ma, the dancers sometimes do exactly that between sections, and the aesthetic also shows up in the way the two women telling the story about the barren woman correct each other. “We rehearse to get imperfection,” Khan told the Lincoln Center audience in a question-and-answer session after the show, “to keep the mistakes in the story.”
One way this happens is by drawing on the improvisational heritage of Kathak. Traditionally, dancer and musician engage in a dialogue, the dancer beating out rhythms with his feet, or vocalizing them, quick-tongued, in the syllables called bol (syllables that are bound up with the time-cycles and rhythmic patterns of the drumming). When Khan first started studying with his guru, he had to take two years of music lessons before he could begin learning the dance. In Ma, the dancers move towards this kind of musicianship. Near the beginning, the ensemble recites a complicated bol sequence as they execute correspondingly complicated movements. That music is set, but other sections are improvised—most clearly in a traditional give-and-take between Khan and the drummer, an exchange of pulse-quickening complexity—and the whole dance is guided to a large extent by the drummer, and thus fresh with each performance.
This musicality and rhythmic verve is often lacking in European contemporary dance, which tends to prefer theater and spectacle. With sets and lighting by prominent designers, Khan’s dances often look like any other European production—Ma has some blind-the-audience lighting effects—but the Kathak base guarantees that they never lose kinesthetic force. That Kathak base also affects where Khan’s work sits in the oldest argument in Western dance, the one pitting movement against story, abstraction against narrative, pure dance against pantomime. As it happens, a similar argument runs through the history of Kathak. The root of the word means “story,” and the dancers were originally storytellers, minstrels, griots. As the form evolved as a court entertainment under the Persian influence of the Mughals, it grew more virtuosic, more concerned with abstract, mathematically complex rhythmic play for its own sake. Eventually, it split into two major schools, one emphasizing speed and intricate footwork, the other subtle and expressive storytelling.
Khan’s Kathak is clearly of the virtuosic school to begin with, and his contemporary work, by taking traditional gestures out of context, breaking them apart and reshuffling them, moves even the remaining storytelling elements into abstraction, turning them into open symbols. Kaash, Khan’s first evening-length work, came freighted with a complicated concept combining Hindu cycles of destruction and rebirth with theories from contemporary physics, but the ideas were expressed physically. Ma, with its text (edited by the novelist Hanif Kureishi), is an attempt at more explicit narrative, or rather at concepts expressed in words. Khan has said that Ma was inspired by one of Arundhati Roy’s indignant essays about displaced farm workers in India—that the essay got him thinking about how the earth is like a mother to those people.
That idea, in all of its banality, comes across in Ma, especially in the clunky barren-woman fable, told as the blood rushes to the dancer’s heads in a jokey-serious tone Khan says he took from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. In early performances of the work, the evening ended with a forest of the dancers falling out of the tree position and flailing on the floor like fish out of water as Louis Armstrong sang “What a Wonderful World.” Easy cynicism like that is what opens Khan up to the criticism that he is just confused, in the simple, pejorative sense.
Yet it’s heartening that by the time Ma had reached New York, Khan had edited Satchmo out. To judge by the evidence of his countless interviews, the young choreographer seems uncertain about how much of a conceptualist he wants to be. His early fame brings enormous pressures, which he deflects by saying he’s a possibility, not an identity, and by constantly talking about how he likes contradictions and the “in-between place.” That comes across in Ma, too. It’s possible to see in it a story about dual roots, about being suspended between cultures, about seeds budding in new ground or questions his mother couldn’t answer concerning his place in the world. “When movement is a struggle,” Khan once said about his university years, “then it becomes beautiful.” This was true then and it still is, even about the mistakes.
Brian Seibert writes regularly for The Village Voice and The New Yorker. He is working on a history of tap dance..
