Akram Khan, dancer and choreographer, Doctor of Music
Oration by Professor Maria Delgado, Director of Research, The
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London
Chancellor, in accordance with the Charter, Statutes and Ordinances of the University, I present to you
this person on whom we wish you to confer the Degree of Doctor of Music honoris causa.
I would like to begin with a quote:
“Bengali boy from South London learns Indian dance, tours with a British theatre director based in
France, studies in Brussels, then goes global. Now the world’s his oyster.”
These words from dance critic Sanjoy Roy, published in the Guardian in September 2009, serve as a
crystallised summary of one of the most remarkable dancer-choreographers of the contemporary age,
Akram Khan. His is a career marked by innovation and virtuosity, by a restless energy and profound
creative spirit, by the need to make and discover, to explore how dance can tell stories and inspire us
to engage with the world around us. Akram Khan creates dance pieces that live in the moment:
profoundly, ethically and spiritually.
Akram Khan grew up with dance. Born in 1974 to Bangladeshi parents, he was taught Bengali folk
dance by his mother, Anwara, at the age of three, and commenced training in the north Indian classical
dance of kathak at seven. Khan wasn’t overly keen on attending the kathak classes in the early days,
recalling in a 2007 interview that he didn’t want to go to the Indian Institute with his mother and sister
Murshida – Knight Rider was on television and he didn’t want to miss it. Khan now recognises that
kathak (the word means to tell a story,) with its intricate rhythms and contrasts between pace and
silence, is the core of what he does. He admits to now seeing things with a kathak eye. Putting on the
ankle bells that form part of the kathak costume for an hour each morning is ‘the centre of everything’
for him.
Dance, however, has always come in many shapes and forms for Khan. Michael Jackson proved a
seminal early influence. ‘If Michael Jackson, hadn’t been there’, he stated in 2009, ‘I don’t know if I
would have become a dancer. He was the first person I connected with. I remember when I saw Thriller
… It had everything – music, storytelling, dance. Michael Jackson was the first [person] to create that
marriage between pop and dance. It changed everything’.
When Khan describes how Michael Jackson created ‘his own techniques and his own language of
movement’ he could be referring to his own career, which demonstrates a similar willingness to move
beyond established conventions.
Akram Khan was touring with Peter Brook’s seminal production of The Mahabharata while still a
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teenager – the renowned director invited him to form part of the company after seeing him perform
with the Academy of Indian Dance in 1984. Khan then went on to study at De Montfort University
Leicester before transferring to the Northern School of Contemporary Dance where he graduated with
the highest grades ever awarded by the institution.
His subsequent career has been one of ongoing curiosity and exploration. Early solo pieces were
interspersed with performances with choreographer Jonathan Burrows, and then a residency with
Anne Teresa de Keersmaerk’s PARTS School choreography programme in Brussels. In 2000 Khan
established the Akram Khan Company with ex-dancer and producer Farooq Chaudhry, offering a model
of artistic practice grounded in dialogue and enquiry, where difference is recognised and celebrated.
His way of working recognises the centrality of the dancer’s body as a repository of meanings and
memories, but crucially generates improvisations from discussions with the dancers around a certain
topic, story or idea. Improvisations then generate further ideas and from this rich tapestry of
reflections and observations the fabric of the production is constructed. His roll call of collaborators
reads like a who’s who of contemporary culture across different disciplines: Antony Gormley, Anish
Kapoor, Juliette Binoche, Hanif Kureishi, Steve Reich, Nitin Sawhney, Israel Galván, and many, many
others.
In 2005, Khan created Zero Degrees with Flemish-Moroccan dancer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, sculptor
Antony Gormley and composer Nitin Sawhney, narrating the story of a train journey he had embarked
on from Bangladesh to India through a danced conversation between the two men. That same year he
choreographed a section of Kylie Minogue’s Showgirl concert. Sacred Monsters, a duet first presented
with French ballerina Silvie Guillem in 2006, offered an incisive, passionate reflection on the journeys
from the classical to the contemporary undertaken by both dancers through their professional lives.
With actress Juliette Binoche in In-I (2008), the struggles of cohabitation were enacted with energy,
intensity and humour. Anish Kapoor, who designed the sets for both In-I and Kaash, his first full-length
choreographed piece in 2002, notes his ‘great stage presence’; Sylvie Guillem speaks of his ‘unusual
energy and light, and a thirst to do things’. Khan himself recognises the importance of taking risks;
‘there's a danger’ he believes, ‘when you stop doing that’.
In 2007 Khan created Bahok (the title means carrier in Bengali) with a group of nine dancers – five from
his own company and four from the National Ballet of China, the first choreography in which he did not
himself perform. The international cast – including Chinese, Indian, Korean, South African, and Spanish
performers – presented a timely, profound reflection on quest and the search for home set in an
airport lounge where the marooned characters enact their own stories of loss and separation. Akram
Khan makes work that speaks to the dilemmas and debates of our time, of multicultural journeys
across minds and matter, a world of migrants on the move. His 22 dance pieces have been seen across
60 different countries and garnered over 25 awards. Khan was made an MBE for Services to Dance in
2005.
There are many elements of his work that make him so unique as a performer and choreographer. The
fusion of classical and avant-garde choreography, speed and stillness, speech and storytelling; the
different artistic vocabularies that he brings together; the precision and delicacy of a gesture or move;
words disappearing into movement; actors dancing, dancers acting. His influences range from hip-hop
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and flamenco to kabuki and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. The sheer eclecticism of his
choreography, from the intimacy of the Olivier-award winning full length solo DESH (2011) to the fiftyplus bodies that featured in his epic work for opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, speaks to
the extraordinary breadth of one of our most dynamic creative artists. On 12 January 2016 Khan will
premiere a new piece, Until the Lions, a return to the Mahabharata, the epic Sanskrit text with which
he has already engaged in Gnosis (2009). Until the Lions is already featuring on a number of ‘must see’
cultural lists for the coming year.
‘Great dance’, Akham Khan wrote in 2009, ‘as opposed to learning a set of moves – can only come
from within’. The great dance that Akram Khan has created ‘from within’ for over 30 years and shared
with audiences across the globe is testament to the power of art to move and motivate us, to inspire
us and to remind us of what it means to be human.
Chancellor, it is with great pleasure that I ask you to confer the Degree of Doctor of Music honoris
causa on Akram Khan.
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