Stories told when young can inspire a creative career: Akram Khan contemporary dance
Oxford Festival of the Arts, Akram Khan Company: Chotto Desh, at Oxford Playhouse on Saturday, July 6
Review by JON LEWIS
AKRAM Khan’s entrancing 50-minute autobiographical solo dance work from 2015, Chotto Desh, performed at the Oxford Playhouse as part of the Oxford Festival of the Arts by the Akram Khan Company, reveals magically how immersing yourself in a world of memories and the imagination, especially in stories told when young, can inspire a creative career.
Khan, performed with panache and magnetism by Nico Ricchini, connects with his youth after dialling a call centre in Bangladesh to fix his mobile phone.
The sassy 12-year-old girl on the line, broadcast like all the characters in a voiceover, focuses him, as a British citizen, on his Bangladeshi-Philippino heritage.
Suddenly Ricchini is whirling around in a noisy, busy Bangladeshi street to the cacophony of hooters and bicycle bells.
He plays a multitude of roles from street beggars, cripples with no legs, commuters dodging cars and a street cop.
The second section focuses on the father, his eyes and a mouth comically inked onto Ricchini’s bowed bald head, in a sequence that thrillingly fuses Kathak and contemporary dance.
Chotto Desh means ‘small nation’ in Bengali, but his mother’s narration of the story of The Honey Hunter, written by Karthika Nair, Khan and director-adaptor Sue Buckmaster of Theatre-Rites, shows how something small can wield a huge influence.
With Jocelyn Pook’s often Glassian score, Tim Yip’s versatile grey-blue backdrop and YeastCulture’s inspired animations of a forest canopy, Khan’s roots and his inquiring, creative nature merge seamlessly, Ricchini dancing between the entangling drawings.
A little boy’s quest to steal honey from bees high up in the trees leads to momentous encounters with the jungle’s elephant, butterflies, and menacingly, the king of the jungle, a roaring tiger.
Among this fantasy, a moment of serious political drama intrudes with a fleeting animation of the man holding up a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Khan’s fidgety nature and his desire to perform sexy, shuffling Michael Jackson routines, battle his father’s innate conservatism after he emigrated with his village cook skills to become a chef in London.
A spectacular, iconic production that drew a standing ovation from the family audience.
