It was difficult to watch British dancer-choreographer Akram Khan perform on Saturday night at Novel Hall. There was so much going on that the eyes and brain couldn’t keep up. If you focused on his arms, you missed the feet; if you focused on the feet, you missed his eyes and head.
His arms and hands — epic poems could be written about Khan’s gracefully undulations that swoop and soar and swirl. His feet, bare as needs dictate for traditional Indian Kathak dance, sometimes tapped gently with the beat, other times they stamped so hard you feared either the boards or his feet would break.
In the Indian tradition, the dancer is as much a percussionist and singer as a performer — the three are intertwined, while the focus of the movement is on the vertical, the spiraling of energy in a search for spirituality, for the eternal. There is also a constant conversation between the dancer and the musicians, through body and sound.
The first half of the show was pure Kathak, with Khan showing the benefits of years of training that began when he was 6. It was divided into three segments, the first two pre-set, while for the third Khan brought out a microphone so he could talk to the audience, introducing both the musicians and a little bit about Kathak. Then he did what he called “a little bit of jazz improv” to demonstrate the interaction and the conversation between dancer and musician, which gave tabla player Sanju Sahai a chance to shine. Khan apparently enjoyed himself so much that this portion ran 20-minutes over its scheduled time. The musicians got a huge and well-deserved round of applause on their own: vocalist Faheem Mazhaf, Sanju Sahai, sarod-player Soumik Datta, cellist Lucy Railton and Taiko drummer Yoshie Sunahata.
The second half of the show was Gnosis, Khan’s pairing with Sunahata in a retelling of a tale from the Mahabharata of Queen Gandari, who rebelled against being forced to marry a blind king by blindfolding herself, and who went ahead and bore a son even though he was destined to destroy their clan. Khan’s retelling focuses on the power of women, and in Sunahata he found a prime proponent. Her queen was regal, determined and never powerless, until the final climatic struggle with her son.
In their solos and in their duets, Khan and Sunahata were mesmerizing to watch: the love, the hate, the battle for control. Having been dispatched by her son, the queen reappears singing (a Japanese love song) that is more a lament full of longing and remorse as her son is torn by what he has done, endlessly circling his hands as if to rid them of a stain. In the end, Khan stands alone, his body rigidly convulsing into a frantic blur as the lights go out.
Gnosis is the first time Khan has performed a mixed program, both Kathak and contemporary dance segments in one show. He said he decided to try it because he was bored and wanted a new challenge because the demands on the body and on the mind for each form are so different. Here’s hoping Khan stays bored so he will do more shows like Gnosis — how much more cross-cultural and universal can you get than a Bengali singer singing a Corsican song in the Arabic tradition while a Kathak-trained dancer performs with a Japanese taiko drummer-dancer-singer. The mind boggles.
The power of the show, and of Khan himself, was demonstrated by the fact that more than 250 people stayed around at the end of the performance for a short post-show talk.
Khan’s three-performance run this weekend at Novel Hall, his fourth appearance at the theater, brought a fitting end to the Novel Hall Dance series — at least for now. Novel Hall will be closing in November for a six-month overhaul of its lighting and rigging system, so there won’t be any dance next May. The series is scheduled to resume in 2012.
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