Akram Khan Dance Company: iTMOi -
Sydney Opera House, Drama Theatre, 29 August -
“A rupture in the mind; a death in the body; a birth in the soul.” - Akram Khan (program note)
This year celebrates the centenary of the sensational premiere of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which shocked and divided its Paris audience with its avant-garde orchestral score and Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography.
iTMOi (In The Mind Of Igor) is British dancer/choreographer Akram Khan’s latest work – 65 impact-and imagery-rich minutes inspired, we are told, by Stravinsky’s mind, methodology and modernist approach which uses patterns to evoke emotion rather than expression. Khan reinvestigates this legendary work through what seems to be a deeply personal exploration of the human condition and the chaotic, violent act of generation.
Like Stravinsky, Khan has artistic roots in folk culture, and like Stravinsky he draws on these to create powerful aesthetic juxtapositions to express the contradictions of human nature. The choreography frequently references his classical Indian dance background through articulate gestural port de bras and complex synchronized stamping rhythms. Khan weaves this vocabulary adeptly through the work, providing us first with meaningful symbols and behaviours, then breaking away from them, toying and critiquing them, and giving his dancers (who share the movement creation credit) the space to express themselves with their own unique qualities: convulsing, breaking, rippling and writhing.
Commanding the loose narrative are a number of characters – a gabbling and hysterical trance preacher, a sculptural and distant queen, and the sacrificial curiosity-filled innocent. Then there’s the fool, who sees through and highlights foibles, and an obscure horned-creature lending an ominous presence as he sensuously crawls and creeps about the stage. . These characters are a mish mash of Khan’s explorations of conservatism and ritual, liberty and animal urges and genesis and death. The ensemble is like a Greek chorus – sometimes supportive, sometimes voyeuristic, sometimes responsive, affected by and affecting the scenes.
The eleven very diverse dancers were simply consummate, cohering through strength, fluidity and bold abandon. Their performance quality was typical of that audacious expressive Belgian style developed under Wim Vandekeybus, Jan Fabre and in latter years Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. Unfortunately the cast list was democratically alphabetic so we were not able to identify the dancers in relation to their performances.
iTMOi is helped along with a striking and contrasting sound score (composed by Nitin Sawhney, Jocelyn Pook and Ben Frost). The well-integrated sound worlds build and hold tension and manipulate our emotions, giving us those same shocks and jolts of which Stravinsky himself was master.
The designs for the piece are sculptural and symbolic, although hardly novel. A hanging solid square rig divides and designates the space casting shadows and pressing down upon the action. The costumes, however striking, use predictable references to a civilisation’s constraints of rules and rituals – corsets, hooped skirts, white powder thrown on bodies and a fantastical crown headdress.
Despite being packed with powerful components, iTMOi left me untouched, unengaged. Khan can certainly choreograph organized chaos and juxtapositions but the imagery remains in a world of its own, detached. Lacking is a device or perhaps dramaturgical skill to bring the images beyond the stage and into the audience. And although there is reasonable coherence in the piece through analysis, the gel was not there in the performance itself. Rather than being carried along by the flow of scenes, you question them. As it is, they play out in a space removed from the audience and by the end I was left wondering how I could feel so little.
- EMMA SANDALL