Akram Khan spellbinds Dhaka with DESH
Akram Khan, one of the best contemporary dancer-choreographers of his generation, left two houseful audiences on consecutive days at the National Theatre Hall of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy in awe with a magnetic 80-minute solo, in a way only he could. At its Dhaka premiere (and the subsequent staging) on September 19 and 20, DESH lived up to its repute and then some – particularly because of the audience he performed it for.
The stagings were organised by The British Council in association with Bengal Foundation, and in partnership with The Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. The Daily Star, the Daily Prothom Alo and Channel i were media partners, while Blues Communications were in charge of event management.
DESH opens with Akram Khan wielding a sledgehammer on a grave-like structure, and then engaging in a conversation with his father (or of a “small man” his father told him of) from a village in Bangladesh in front of it. The intricate production then swings between a narrative and abstraction, from trying to communicate with a tech support operator from Chittagong about the malfunctioning voicemail on his phone; conversing with Eshita, a young girl (possibly his daughter, or maybe niece), telling her a story of honeybees -- of Dakhin Rai and Bondebi (a fable from the Sunderbans) in a juxtaposition of the Sunderbans with London’s Wimbledon Park; his relations with his parents, of aversion to his Bangladeshi roots and the conflict of generations with his father.
But on the flipside of it is his strong resonance to the anti-dictatorship movement of the 90s in Bangladesh, the echoes of the Liberation War rooted deep in his subconscious, and a tug to Bangladesh that he can neither explain, nor deny. Along his quest, Akram finds himself as he looks deeper into himself, but it does not come without agony and haplessness inside of him, of the things he never knew was there. As the end looms, Akram uproots a plant from that grave, and digs in to reach in and pull out his father’s panjabi, that he then puts on – in a striking expression of uprooting himself to finally find the connection to his roots. But finding that does not bring him solace; the missed connection with his father continues to haunt him, in the form of a repeating voicemail -- and his soul-searching continues even as the performance ends.
Akram Khan puts the entire weight of his artistic prowess to drive DESH home. Incorporating the essence of Kathak – where the performer metamorphoses into different characters and tells a multi-perspective story, with pulsating, exuberant expressions of contemporary dancing, and his theatrics – in dialogue and body language even when he’s not dancing, he adds on dimension after dimension to the piece. Whether he is writhing on the floor in pain of his toes being cut off, nimbly moving across the floor almost as if floating inches off ground, rowing a boat in folk-dance like fashion, or hanging upside down from in between drapes, Akram’s performance itself defies his age of 40 by a decade. But what remains most remarkable is how he balances art and entertainment – expertly interspersing elements that the audience are awestruck by, with powerful, surrealistic elements of profound emotional gravity. From the coarsely painted face on his bald pate that he uses both as a character and a puppet-esque prop, to the poignant raised fist on the foreground of chants of “Shoirachar Nipat Jak, Gonotontro Mukti Pak”, everything put on stage is bold and purposeful, and nothing is subliminal.
The production value also has a big part in making DESH as engrossing as it is. From Oscar-winning art director Tim Yip’s (for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) magical interactive animation, especially the piece in the Sunderbans sequence, to Joselyn Pook’s impeccable sound-work, be it ambient sounds, instrumental tracks or the perfectly-interjected song “Jole Bhasha Poddo Ami”, and imaginative light design by Michael Hulls elevate the display to new heights. The set and light design is also quintessentially European, creating strong visual impacts – contrasting a giant chair with a miniature one, an entire wing coming down on the stage, or a back-lit shadow performance.
For the production that has circled the world, what made the staging here was that this was the audience that could see more layers in it than any international audience. The Bangla dialogues, the visuals of Sunderbans, and the references to the Liberation War and martyr Nur Hossain were not fiction to the Dhaka audience; they were very real, very familiar, and very personal. And as audience, we could safely hope that this would be Akram’s most satisfying, most liberating presentation of the one production that is more intrinsic than his other work, of his connections and conflicts with his roots.
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