Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic For a retired dancer, Akram Khan is about to spend a lot of time on stage. In Gigenis, his new work inspired by Indian classical dance, the British choreographer is an integral part of the cast, his arms slicing through the air in rapid-fire group sequences, as sweepingly expressive as ever.“I was never meant to be in it,” the 50-year-old admits with a mischievous grin when we meet in Aix-en-Provence the day after the world premiere. “I was kind of seduced into it — by myself.”He is quick to add that he never retired from performing altogether — only from full-length solo performances, which he had come to find physically draining. “It was a culmination of things,” he says of his decision to step back after Xenos, which premiered in 2018. “It’s a bit like the ‘Kate Bush syndrome’: anxiety started to set in before shows. The whole day before, I was doubting every step. Am I going to get injured? Am I going to fail?”The stage keeps luring him back, however. While Xenos was initially scheduled to tour for a couple of years, Khan ended up performing it until 2023. His full-on turn in Gigenis, which heads to London’s Sadler’s Wells in November, suggests that his plans for the next stage of his dancing career — “holding poses occasionally or little cameo roles” — may have been premature. What he couldn’t resist, he says, was responding to the seven Indian classical singers and musicians who surround the dancers in Gigenis. “For artists who have had a conversation with music all their life, once it starts, you deeply connect.”Many contemporary dance festivals don’t have dance in them . . . the dance world has partly been hijacked by visual artists and curators, because that’s where the money isAs we chat, Khan tucks into a takeaway lunch in the empty restaurant of the Grand Théâtre de Provence, the largest indoor theatre in Aix, where Gigenis had its initial run in August. The timing of the premiere was unusual in France, where the summer break is sacred. Such is the power of Khan, and the international prominence of his blend of kathak (an Indian classical style) and contemporary dance, that the theatre’s director and staff agreed to return early from their holidays in order to host Gigenis.While Khan’s creations are typically planned in meticulous detail, Gigenis has been something of an outlier. It was, he says, “originally meant to be a festival”, a celebration of Indian classical artists held in different cities, in the vein of the dance programme that Khan and Malaysian dancer Mavin Khoo curated for London’s Darbar Festival in 2017-19. Yet when it came to putting it together, Khan realised he wanted more.“Indian classical dance is very much my home,” says Khan, who started training in kathak at the age of seven. Yet he had never choreographed for a group of dancers entirely steeped in that tradition. “I thought: why am I not exploring my own language?”The result is a fascinating choreographic exercise, with several different strands of South Asian dance represented. On stage, Khan is joined by a handful of bharatanatyam specialists, including two of his frequent collaborators, Khoo and American dancer Mythili Prakash. Then there is an Indian prodigy, Sirikalyani Adkoli, from Nrityagram, a renowned “dance village” that trains classical artists near Bengaluru; and Kapila Venu, a representative of the ancient tradition of kutiyattam, which Khan describes as “theatre movement”.Yet the idea for this journey back to his roots was born after a brush with another classical dance form: ballet. Over the past decade, Khan has built a close relationship with English National Ballet at the invitation of the company’s former director, Tamara Rojo. Giselle, his reimagining of the 19th-century classic, was a high point in 2016 and has gone on to lasting success: this week, it returns to Sadler’s Wells with new casts.Making this Giselle, Khan explains, helped him to rethink his relationship with contemporary dance. After his early success with kathak — as a teenager in the late 1980s, he toured the world in Peter Brook’s Mahabharata — he studied contemporary dance and started blending his influences, developing a fusion style that immediately resonated with audiences. “The question I asked myself with Giselle was: if my contemporary dancers could do it, then why am I working with classical artists? So I set myself a rule: to take everything from them [classical dancers]. I would say Giselle is 80-85 per cent their language.”It was a departure from the attitude of many contemporary choreographers in ballet, who endeavour to teach classical dancers “their” style. Yet in recent years, Khan has grown disillusioned with these spaces. “A lot of contemporary dance festivals don’t have dance in them,” he says. “They have ideas. I think the dance world has partly been hijacked by visual artists and curators, because that’s where the money is.”Ultimately, this led him to stop “running away” from Indian classical dance and to make Gigenis. Whether they have been trained in ballet or Indian forms, Khan says, classical dancers “all share something”: “They seek perfection. Classical is trying to attain godliness, or a sacredness, while contemporary is about revealing the imperfection.”That love of craft, and the hard work that goes into refining it, has been a constant in Khan’s life. During the pandemic, he channelled the frustration of not being able to dance into learning ju-jitsu, training four to five hours a day with a teacher in his back garden. “It was interesting, because I realised how much ego I have,” he says. “I thought: ‘I’m going to be really good at this.’ And I was getting destroyed. I’m still getting destroyed.”Gigenis is based on an episode of the Mahabharata. It centres on a mother who lost her husband to war and whose two sons are feuding. One stands for harmony; the other, played by Khan, for chaos. “I’ve always played the nice guy, but I find the baddies really interesting,” he says. “If I could, I would want to be Miss Trunchbull, the evil headmistress in [Roald Dahl’s] Matilda.”For a while, the villains in Khan’s work became a way to explore his difficult relationship with his father, who died in 2022. “He was very abusive towards the family for a long time, emotionally, psychologically.” Processing through dance, he says, is “the only way I can get through the world. My family are always on stage.”His “strong, unbreakable” mother, especially, was at the forefront of his mind when he made the two productions that London will see this autumn. “Giselle is my mother. The women in Gigenis are my mother,” he says. The “rage” he poured into productions such as 2021’s Creature has now fully subsided, he says. “Now I want to make work that is not just about anger, but that is about beauty and hope.”‘Giselle’, September 18-28; ‘Gigenis’, November 20-24, sadlerswells.comFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
