Akram Khan Company: Desh, Melbourne Festival

Akram Khan Company: Desh, Melbourne Festival -
MTC Theatre, Sumner, 16 October -

Multidisciplinary is a prominent feature of post-modern performance. Creators look to influences outside their immediate practice in order to add layers of meaning to their work and to intensify impact.  This year's Melbourne Festival has showcased a number of works that integrate and experiment with a range of modalities. From Force Majeure's dance/theatre work Never Did Me Any Harm, to Michael van der Aa's opera/documentary, Afterlife, they freely appropriate and intermingle the languages of other artforms.

Desh, presented by Akram Khan Company, takes this to a stratospheric level, combining dance with significant visual, lighting, sound and design effects. The question for me is whether the discipline of dance loses its primacy in this extraordinary presentation. This wouldn't be an issue if the dance was mediocre, but Khan's dance and choreography is beautiful and at times feels as if it needs more space to breathe.

Akram Khan is a British-born dancer/choreographer of Bangladeshi descent. In Desh, his first full-length solo work, he explores narratives around his ethnicity and issues connected to his consciousness of Bangladesh and how this relates to him personally and to the country itself. 

Desh builds choreographically from an uncluttered visual landscape where circular and spiralling phrases are punctuated with suspension of movement. A soundscape evokes the busy chaos of traffic.  Khan's dance has him pulled forcefully in different directions as if in a maelstrom, both resisting and interacting with his invisible environment. Movement vocabulary shifts from flowing contemporary, to referencing Indian classical Kathak dance and back again.

Scenes develop to show a series of micro worlds that as a whole, represent the big picture of Khan's vision. These are all visually striking in various ways. The starkness of a propeller blade, the thin, distant voice of an Indian telco call-centre worker, begin to layer a series of narratives. Khan transforms into a village baker by using facial features painted on the top of his bald head as an alternative face. At first seeming like a facetious exercise in skilful physical manipulation of self, it develops into a significant story. It is an exercise in illusion and there is astonishing dexterity in the way he appears to be juggling his own head. Here, Khan becomes a puppeteer of his own body.

One of the most overtly visually arresting scenes has Khan drawing in light on a scrim. The visual effects build to reveal an overwhelming and lush jungle, complete with huge-canopied trees, butterflies, a massive elephant and a crocodile. A little row boat on a river eventually is replaced by a battleship, referencing both war and the destruction of this garden of Eden. Although absolutely consummate in design, this has a cartoonish feel that interrupts the dance aspect of the work.

The visual styling of each episode of Desh is different, however, they are unified by being almost all monochromatic black and white. Still, the design doesn't feel entirely coherent and seems to be the work of many artists telling separate stories. As such, each episode is self-contained. Cross-cultural and cross-generational stories are told and these narratives are developed into complete, stand-alone scenes.

I am not a dance purist, but having seen Khan dance in the early scenes, I had limited patience for anything that intruded on his delivery of movement. I would have loved a  work that focused on Khan as dancer and the simplicity of the single figure moving in space. There was more narrative than necessary in Desh and although visually enchanting, the design was allowed to speak too loudly.
 
-- SUSAN BENDALL