Vertical Road (Review)

"I died from minerality and became vegetable;
And from vegetativeness I died and became animal,
I died from animality and became man.
Then why fear disappearance through death?
Next time I shall die
Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels;
After that, soaring higher than angels -
What you cannot imagine,
I shall be that."

Rumi (Persian poet and philosopher)

It could have gone so wrong for Akram Khan's latest work, 'Vertical Road'. With its nod to Sufi traditions, its lack of script but abundance of isolated ideas, Khan's new choreography could have come across as an alienating and pretentious piece of pseudo-art. Instead, though, the innovative director has created yet another masterpiece which will definitely take its place next to his very own magnum opuses 'Sacred Monsters' (featuring ballerina Sylvie Guillem) and 'zero degrees' (a collaboration with fellow performer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, sculptor Antony Gormley and musician Nitin Sawhney).

Coincidentally, it's Sawhney's score that underlines this, at times delicate and at times disturbing, piece (second clip below). A Jesus-lookalike dancer, Salah El Brogy, stands behind a large screen on one side of the stage. On the other side seven dancers reach out to this god-like presence. Are they on a quest to find their spirituality? Is El Brogy their collective past? For the next hour or so the performers go from one extreme to the other, from convulsive, jerky movements to more lyrical and poetic ones, thus, bringing a much needed vulnerability to a choreography that has a visceral and raw outlook.

According to Akram Khan (first clip below), the inspiration for 'Vertical Road' came from his own questioning about the need for spirituality in today's world. Hence the upwards movements representing the quest towards a more unembodied approach to our lives, whilst the horizontal motions stand for our lives as we know them. But that's as far as any coherent theory about this work goes. The piece has a life of its own. I would dare to say that in the same way Pollock allowed his brushes to do the talking for him in his abstract works (all that spilling paid off in the end, methinks), Khan uses his eight dancers' energy and strength to explore issues such as collective past, violence and love.

The music is loud, raw and brutal and, mixed with an almost bare stage, complements perfectly the spiritual message Khan is intent on conveying. Yet, inside this musical onslaught theres is a discernible frailty. I wasn't surprised when (spoiler alert!!!) the screen is ripped at the end.

When I read Rumi's poem in the programme before the show I prepared myself for an abstract piece where the place spirituality occupies in the world nowadays would be given a metaphorical interpretation by Khan's eight dancers. At the end of the show I realised that the person 'performing' the figure of speech was Akram himself. In my opinion he was explaining what his mission as an artist was. 'Vertical Road' was his way of saying "Next time I shall die (...)What you cannot imagine, I shall be that."

© 2010

Next Post: 'Food, Music, Food, Music, Food, Music... Ad Infinitum', to be published on Thursday 11th November at 11:59pm (GMT)

Word, Movement, Sound, Music (Zero Degrees by Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui)

Word

Question: If we are each other’s mirrors, why do we fight?
Answer: Because we break the mirror.
Question: But why?
Answer: Because we do not like the image it returns to us.
Question: But isn’t that a waste of time? The image is human; the function of the mirror is to make you look human.
Answer: Wrong question and pathetic analysis. The function of the mirror is to return the compliment, nothing less, nothing more.
Question: But…
Answer: No buts, time to go to your cell.

Movement

You raise your right hand at the same time I raise my left one. You speak my words and I speak yours. Your green skin blends with my turquoise one. You hoist your knee at the same time I hoist mine.

There’s still hope.

Sound

There’s a man in the Immigration Control Office. He is trying to explain to the official there that he has got the correct documentation to cross the border. The official is not paying any attention. He is only focused on the man’s lips. Too thick. On the man’s hands. Too fine. On the man’s voice. Too articulate. On the man’s skin colour. Too different. On the man’s mannerisms. Too different. On the man’s hair. Too different. Everything about this man is different.

Finally the official rises and motions the man to stop talking. He leans over his desk, examines the man’s passport and stamps his thoughts down. ‘No Entry’.

Music

Once there was a cricket that refused to rub his wings to make music just like the other crickets. One day he turned up in the middle of a crickets’ concert with a fiddle. He didn’t know how to play it but vowed to learn it. The only request he had was that he be allowed to join the orchestra once he finished his training. They refused to accept him and sent him away from their colony. Years after the cricket came back, already a famous violinist and gave a concert to the whole community. He was praised greatly, but at the crack of dawn he left, never to be seen again. Since then, everyone has been trying to find the cricket that plays the fiddle.

Copyright 2008

Meditations on our 'Contemporary Society' according to Akram Khan (Metamorphosis for Ten Performers)

'I feel we live in a society that is evolving at great speed, and it is because of this momentum of shifting that we still call it a ‘contemporary society’. All traditions were once contemporary; it is just a matter of time when something is regarded as old or part of a tradition.'

With this introductory note in the programme Akram Khan unleashes a barrage of fidgety, energetic and inspiring dance moves onto the unsuspecting public in attendance at Sadlers' Wells to watch his latest choreographic work, Bahok.



A departure lounge is the setting for all the chaos that ensues. Amidst notices like ‘Delayed’ and ‘Rescheduled’, the performers (or would that be passengers?) map swiftly across the vast stage the main theme the piece addresses: globalised isolation.

Akram Khan has been here before. In his 2005 work ‘Zero Degrees’ which he performed alongside the Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the target was identity and the lack of it thereof. His follow-up, ‘Sacred Monsters’, saw him breaking down barriers (literally) with the magnificent dancer Sylvie Guillem in the pursuit of a common language (and we are not thinking linguistics here). Bahok, on the other hard, combines guest artists from the National Ballet of China and performers from Spain, South Korea, Slovakia, India and South Africa. United Colours of Benetton? You bet. The result is a prism through which themes like intolerance, despair, bitterness, elation, hope and optimism are explored in both theatrical and danceable forms.

If we think of each performer on the night as a small entity in themselves and not just as yet another group of dancers, we arrive, then, at the conclusion that they are human crotchets, dissimilar parts of a bigger whimsical notion, one that becomes the final product: HOPE. This is the word that flashes up on the screen as the show wraps up and it is the word that leaves everyone in the auditorium clapping to the dancers’ dextrous versatility.

Akram Khan patterns the choreography in the same way a grammar teacher prepares a lesson. Whereas the former will go for up and slow tempos the latter will go for rising and falling intonation standards. Khan's is a piece full of the slithering interplay between performers, with some of them bickering with one another and others falling into freestyle ballet dance blithely. These pairings, of which there are various combinations, act like a dynamic device, speeding the piece up or slowing it down.



Ultimately it is Akram Khan’s mastery of the unsaid that works wonders. The piece does not seek to explain or tell why and how our ‘contemporary society’ became this way. Yet, Bahok implicates all of us, observant audience, in its doing.

In another part of the programme, Khan writes: ‘The stage is usually the place where I can reveal not only an image from my head, but also what I feel is missing or needed in the contemporary society around me, but somehow I believe it is not about me preaching to others of what is missing in their lives but mostly what is missing in my own… so the whole approach to my work is about acquiring new knowledge by reviewing the old knowledge that the new does not have.’

Wise words and ones that make me already look forward to his next piece.

Copyright 2008