Akram Khan’s plan to tour his final solo performance in Xenos, following its premiere in May 2018, through to coincide with his company’s twentieth anniversary in November 2020, was inevitably halted by the pandemic. When I reviewed that premiere, in this same theatre, the considerable physical requirements on an ageing body seemed a mighty challenge to maintain for another two years. Khan himself has been candid about confronting the reality of time on his capacity as a solo dancer, but – even with a further year’s delay – it is pleasing to report that, now aged 47, he retains everything it takes to be a mesmeric performer. His theatrical power now combines with the experience to pace a long and demanding solo and know exactly when to hit the boost button for his trademark hi-energy, explosive movement. It all adds up to an indefinable magic that very few artists possess.
In this last solo work, Khan honours the million-plus Indian citizens who fought for King and (another) Country in the horrors of World War 1 and especially the 75,000 Indian soldiers who died in the mud of the Western Front, at Gallipoli and in other unfamiliar places. A few names of these men are read out unemotionally in Khan’s own recorded voice, together with their profession. Many were engineers but one stood out as being a former dancer at the Court of the Nawab. We come to understand that this is the featured character of Xenos; a man apparently trapped in a shell-hole in No Man’s Land after laying telephone cables in the mire.
Xenos means “stranger”, or perhaps more aptly in this context, a foreigner, thousands of miles from home, fighting someone else’s battle. A sequence of visual and aural images suggest this theme of a classical Indian dancer uprooted from his traditions and transported to a lonely hell hole on the other side of the world. The work had opened, as the audience took their seats, in a calming musical performance and Khan’s eventual appearance (signalled by an abrupt electrical surge in the lighting) is with ghungroo bells tightly wrapped around his ankles to perform a classical kathak solo with absorbing intensity and delicate finesse. By contrast, the work finished with contemporary dance movement and impactful dance theatre imagery, such as the appearance of the five musicians as ghostly apparitions above the crater (Michael Hulls’ lighting is extraordinarily effective throughout) and the closing sequence in which thousands of pine cones roll and bounce into the crater.
This parallel journey from kathak to war and from the classical Indian dance form to modern dance theatre is equally indicative of both the lived experience of the character and of the artistic arc of the performer. I found myself reimagining Khan’s Ronin trilogy of kathak solos, performed at the Southbank, early in his career since here was the same signature movement in elegant spiralling arms, darting hand patterns, quicksilver feet and lightning-fast chakkars (pirouettes in kathak dance terminology). And then, as if summarising his own career trajectory, we move into the metaphors of modern dance that have characterised later work. There was even a moment where Khan’s character peers down into the crater that brought back a direct memory from Dust (2014), his World War 1 work for English National Ballet. Dust has been a leitmotif throughout Khan’s work and it came as no surprise that he ends Xenos liberally coated in it.
The range of Vincenzo Lamagna’s eclectic soundscape is extraordinary, encompassing the lyrical purity and rhythmic poetry of kathak to the uncomfortable noise of war, which at its most visceral was something like I imagine the sound of wheel hubs on a fast spin cycle or ball-bearings grinding in a metal cog. Accompanied by gunshots and distant dog barks, it was unsettling but entirely appropriate to the theme.
As soon as Khan’s first solo was complete he unwound the ankle bells, which joined the many rope trails that hung down into the crater in Mirella Weingarten’s dystopian set. A group of dining chairs, a rattan rug and sundry other items lined the stage and – attached to the ropes – they are eventually pulled ‘over the top’ as Khan desperately tries to hold on to this domestic detritus, a striking metaphor for the “stranger” uprooted from a home far away, caught in a desperate and lonely situation.
It has taken a year longer than originally planed for Xenos to come full circle back to Sadler’s Wells and it made a memorable last hurrah for Khan’s solo dance career. He is too emblematic and charismatic a performer to stop dancing altogether, but we will experience his magic in smaller doses as part of a bigger picture. It is a future to be eagerly anticipated.
