Akram Khan reinvents Gandhari in a powerful Kathak performance

How many artists can walk onto the stage at a premier of a new show, perform only twenty minutes of the original piece due to an injury and yet get a standing ovation and glittering critical reviews? Akram Khan achieved exactly that at what was supposed to be the premier of his new solo in London. Khan will be at the Sydney Opera House in May this year with Gnosis, which has been described by one London critic as taking the viewer “to the outer reaches of nirvana”.

Inspired by the story of Gandhari from the Mahabharata—the queen who blindfolds herself for life to share her blind husband’s journey. Khan, who toured for two years with Peter Brooks’ version of the Mahabharata when he was 9, says he was always fascinated by Gandhari. “She has a very powerful character, and had the hardest journey,” says Khan. For Gnosis, he researched the Mahabharata and specifically Gandhari’s character with scholars.

“There are discrepancies in what was written and how it is interpreted, as there is in all religions. I had to think about which version I would go with—rather I decided to create my own version, which is quite abstract,” explains Khan. “I wanted to separate the story from religion, which can be too concrete and see it as a fairytale to give more freedom.”

“For me, these themes are just landscapes, images, sketches from which ideas spring, and are then transformed into a more personal interpretation of the story; which I like to describe as a ‘story of movements’,” he writes in his creative statement.

So, Gnosis is also Khan’s own story as much as a mythic tale. “It is my journey in a way. I live in two worlds—one world is the classical Kathak and the other is contemporary. So the show is also composed of two halves—one classical and one contemporary.”

After spending several years doing ensembles and duets— his recent collaborators include Juliette Binoche, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Nitin Sawhney and Steve Reich—in Gnosis he returns to his classical Indian dance roots. The show begins in a classical set up as Khan revisits motifs of two earlier works, Polaroid Feet and Tarana. “By the middle of the journey I begin to deconstruct the formal presentation and to transform it into an informal situation,” he says.

It is this transformation and reinterpretation of the two dance styles which Khan bring to the stage, that has led him to such acclaim. As a British-Bangladeshi, Khan began learning Kathak from the celebrated Kathak teacher, Sri Pratap Pawar at his mother’s behest. He later got a degree in contemporary dance from De Montfort University—his first brush with classical ballet, contact improvisation and physical theatre.

I ask if the two contrasting learning styles led to a cultural shock as a youngster. “My mother was always involved in the Bengali community and events. So I understood and appreciated the guru-shishya parampara and the culture of respect for elders,” says Khan. “The contemporary education was a shock, but also a curiosity as you start to question the ways. Contemporary dance class is like a science class, while classical is like a temple. So I am trying to bring science to the temple and spirituality.”