A Life in Dance

Khan will combine forces with flamenco dancer Israel Galvan in a bullring duet. Khan is known to be careful yet extremely innovative with his collaborations. In the past, he has worked with artist Anish Kapoor, singer Kylie Minogue and French actor and dancer Juliette Binoche, among others. As for working with Galvan, the opposites solicited each other.

Galvan was explosive, Khan more controlled yet immediate. His well-known fluidity found a way to mediate with Galvan’s firebrand moves. “Artistes have to have magic,” he says. “You want to be rubbed off with that magic. I ask myself, do we take each other somewhere where we could not have gone alone. The best way to describe the difference between Israel and I is that he’s like fire and I’m like water,” says Khan.

The dancer is in India after three years, and the visit is exciting in more ways than one. He knows that the technical possibilities are far less in the country because of budget constraints and less production values, but he finds it a blessing in disguise. According to him, the audience still looks at the body, the form and just the dance. “Here, the body still speaks.

In the West, we are looking for concepts, intellect, and meaning. If the production values are weak, it’s very difficult for the Western audiences to accept the performance. The technical possibilities for creativity are far less in India but the purity and vocabulary of the movement is what speaks to me. I can dance under a banyan tree and lights won’t matter as long as I do it well,” says Khan.

Trained in Kathak by Pawar, Khan — a second generation immigrant who was born to Bangladeshi parents — grew up on a regular diet of Michael Jackson and was noticed by theatre and film director Peter Brook, who cast a 14-year-old Khan in his 1985 production Mahabharata. But the discovery of contemporary dance happened much later, at the age of 22, when after shedding a lot of sweat and blood in his father’s garage he went to De Montfort University in Leicester. There he found out a world beyond his coded dance, which at times felt like imprisonment.

Then came years of a merger of classical and contemporary forms. “Tradition taught me about culture, rituals, discipline and sadhana. You take those things away and everything becomes superficial and temporary. Classical was an imprisonment for me, because it establishes form in your body, because it gives you these rules that are sacred. But it’s an impediment only if you feel it’s an impediment. You move ahead and it’s beautiful,” he says.

But Khan’s equivocation about his identity remained a centrepiece to a lot of his works, including his popular piece, Desh. His next production, which is his first big ballet, isn’t devoid of it either. “It is based on migrants and a sense of homelessness. You can’t get more relevant than that in my case. It has to be personal but you have to look for the essence of what you are trying to say. It’s the essence that carries the possibility to be universal,” says Khan, who calls his works both political and relevant.

So when a dancer of his stature, one at the cusp of bringing about a revolution in the world of dance while bridging complexity and subtlety, talks of the fear of failure, it’s rather daunting to understand, or accept. “I almost enjoyed failing sometimes. The more known you become, the less possibilities there are to fail. When you are unknown, failure is a part of the deal. But yes, it scares me,” says Khan. However, he has found a solution. “I will continue for a few more years and then retire from dancing. The kind of work I do, physically, is extremely challenging. It’s hard to maintain it at the age of 40. That would be my great shift physically, emotionally, mentally.” Till then, the world’s watching.

Torobaka will be presented at Kamani Auditorium on October 12 & 13 at 7pm. Entry by passes. Contact: 42199000