Browse content similar to 14/12/2016. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
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Welcome to HARDtalk, I'm Stephen Sackur. | :00:00. | :00:13. | |
In every culture on earth, dance is a physical, joyful form of | :00:14. | :00:20. | |
expression and communication. It is in a way the world's most basic | :00:21. | :00:25. | |
common language. My guest today epitomises the ability of dance to | :00:26. | :00:31. | |
cross borders of time and space. Akram Khan is British by birth, | :00:32. | :00:36. | |
Bangladeshi by family heritage and now globally renowned as one of the | :00:37. | :00:40. | |
great contemporary dancers and choreographers. His performances | :00:41. | :00:44. | |
weave together influences from east and west, past and present. How | :00:45. | :00:47. | |
would he define his dance? Welcome to HARD it is talk. Thank | :00:48. | :01:22. | |
you. So many of the great professional dancers have been | :01:23. | :01:28. | |
raised in one very strict discipline, one cultural tradition, | :01:29. | :01:32. | |
but that isn't quite true of, is it? No. I was born and brought up in | :01:33. | :01:40. | |
London. Already I was exposed to many, many different cultural | :01:41. | :01:43. | |
activities from very different backgrounds. | :01:44. | :01:50. | |
But, my mother wanted me to learn something from her roots and not | :01:51. | :01:53. | |
just language because language was very crucial to her, | :01:54. | :01:55. | |
because of the independence of Bangladesh, the movement | :01:56. | :01:57. | |
originally started for the war to fight | :01:58. | :01:59. | |
between East Pakistan and... So, the Bengali identity, | :02:00. | :02:04. | |
Bangladeshi identity was hugely important. | :02:05. | :02:06. | |
I did, because she refused to speak to me in English. | :02:07. | :02:11. | |
She knew I would learn English in school because I was born | :02:12. | :02:14. | |
She wanted me to be in touch with her language, | :02:15. | :02:18. | |
her culture, but also something that was classical. | :02:19. | :02:20. | |
That was close to her culture and classical Indian dancing | :02:21. | :02:22. | |
was the right thing, so that's what she forced me | :02:23. | :02:25. | |
It is Kathak, exactly, north Indian classical dancing. | :02:26. | :02:33. | |
So, as a kid, you were living in South London, your dad | :02:34. | :02:36. | |
running a restaurant, but were you told that you would be | :02:37. | :02:39. | |
going to dance lessons, the Kathak traditional | :02:40. | :02:41. | |
Yes, it was more of a bribe, if I went I would get | :02:42. | :02:45. | |
something at the end of it because I was a kind of, of course, | :02:46. | :02:48. | |
when you are exposed to so many different things, | :02:49. | :02:50. | |
I was heavily into Michael Jackson... | :02:51. | :02:55. | |
Is it true that you won a prize at school for the best | :02:56. | :03:03. | |
version of Thriller, the Michael Jackson routine? | :03:04. | :03:08. | |
Yes, it was two things it was Michael Jackson, | :03:09. | :03:10. | |
I did a routine, and it was 5-star which is a group in that period that | :03:11. | :03:15. | |
I used to love and they used to be inspired by Michael Jackson, | :03:16. | :03:20. | |
So I guess even, I don't know if we're talking what, | :03:21. | :03:25. | |
ten, 11, 12 years old, you were becoming a sort of fusion | :03:26. | :03:28. | |
in a way of different influences and I wonder whether that when | :03:29. | :03:31. | |
as you progressed through adolescence and you became very keen | :03:32. | :03:35. | |
on different forms of dancing whether there was a tension | :03:36. | :03:38. | |
in you about which direction to go, to follow? | :03:39. | :03:42. | |
I think the tension, yes there was, but the tension comes | :03:43. | :03:45. | |
from my community and social constructs of my parents' community, | :03:46. | :03:49. | |
because academics was really important for them, | :03:50. | :03:53. | |
because they were recently independent as a country, | :03:54. | :03:58. | |
they felt education was the way forward and dance was a hobby, | :03:59. | :04:00. | |
so up to this day, I mean, my community is great | :04:01. | :04:03. | |
and wonderful and supportive, but I do get the | :04:04. | :04:12. | |
occasional, "what do you do as a real job?" | :04:13. | :04:14. | |
Obviously, your parents were from a Muslim tradition. | :04:15. | :04:20. | |
Was that in any way relevant, was there any religious impulse | :04:21. | :04:24. | |
to go in one particular tradition or direction rather than to embrace | :04:25. | :04:27. | |
No, my mother was extremely open, she is a very open, | :04:28. | :04:31. | |
she studied literature, Bengali literature, | :04:32. | :04:32. | |
but she also studied mythology from Greek mythology, | :04:33. | :04:36. | |
Hindu mythology, she was fascinated by stories, narratives, | :04:37. | :04:41. | |
and she kind of coached me into it and guided me into it | :04:42. | :04:45. | |
Many people from around the world will probably be familiar | :04:46. | :04:51. | |
with the Billy Elliot story of the kid Northern, | :04:52. | :04:54. | |
industrial town, a mining sort of town who is a brilliant natural | :04:55. | :04:58. | |
dancer and then has to struggle with himself and his family | :04:59. | :05:02. | |
and his community about getting into the right sort of dance school. | :05:03. | :05:06. | |
That isn't quite what you're telling me. | :05:07. | :05:12. | |
It wasn't that, sort of, having to escape. | :05:13. | :05:14. | |
No, first of all I don't, I wantto be very honest, | :05:15. | :05:21. | |
I was not naturally, I'm not naturally talented. | :05:22. | :05:25. | |
What I am is, I have one talent and that is I, | :05:26. | :05:30. | |
when I get obsessed with something I commit to it in a very | :05:31. | :05:45. | |
extreme way, I can go into my parents' garage, | :05:46. | :05:47. | |
which I did at the age of I think, just after GCSEs, I was lost | :05:48. | :05:54. | |
for a while and I went into my parents' garage | :05:55. | :05:57. | |
So, for a year I was hiding out in my dad's garage. | :05:58. | :06:01. | |
Training in Indian classical dance and that is my talent, | :06:02. | :06:05. | |
Wow, entirely in secret, private just for yourself? | :06:06. | :06:08. | |
I just wanted to get really good at it, I just became obsessed by it, | :06:09. | :06:13. | |
I was fascinated by Kathak, north Indian classical dance. | :06:14. | :06:15. | |
And yet, if we fast forward a little bit to get to where your career | :06:16. | :06:19. | |
begins to take off you actually entered a very different environment | :06:20. | :06:25. | |
you went to one of the UK's top contemporary dance schools and then | :06:26. | :06:28. | |
you started to get work which was beginning to make your name, | :06:29. | :06:32. | |
not in the strict Kathak tradition but by actually finding a dance | :06:33. | :06:38. | |
language which combined some eastern traditional expression with a lot | :06:39. | :06:41. | |
of very, very contemporary, edgy, current Western dance. | :06:42. | :06:43. | |
People like to call, used to call the work fusion, | :06:44. | :06:49. | |
but I preferred to call it confusion, because really my body | :06:50. | :06:54. | |
was very confused at the time and I think out of that confusion | :06:55. | :06:59. | |
Your identity, in a way, which you're exploring, | :07:00. | :07:06. | |
But, it could have been writing, or music or whatever, | :07:07. | :07:12. | |
but you you were very much autobiographical in a way. | :07:13. | :07:17. | |
A lot of my work is autobiographical. | :07:18. | :07:18. | |
I like to touch, there is a lot of questions | :07:19. | :07:22. | |
As I said, Michael Jackson wasn't the only person, | :07:23. | :07:28. | |
I loved Charlie Chaplin, I loved Fred Astaire, | :07:29. | :07:30. | |
Buster Keaton, Muhammad Ali, Bruce Lee, all these people | :07:31. | :07:32. | |
I thought HARDtalk, who's harder than Bruce. | :07:33. | :07:44. | |
It's a great cue, actually because we want to show everybody | :07:45. | :07:47. | |
a little bit of your dance, some of the stuff you have done. | :07:48. | :07:50. | |
Perhaps your most autobiographical work was Kaash, which took you, | :07:51. | :07:55. | |
Let's just enjoy 30 seconds or so of this. | :07:56. | :08:30. | |
For me, it's fascinating on so many levels, here you are, | :08:31. | :08:33. | |
the movement I love it so expressive, but also there's | :08:34. | :08:35. | |
a longing in it and a relationship between you and Bangladesh, | :08:36. | :08:38. | |
I'm trying to figure out whether it's actually, | :08:39. | :08:45. | |
in a sense, sad or whether it's a very positive thing. | :08:46. | :08:51. | |
In a way, I started the show with hammering this kind of grave. | :08:52. | :09:06. | |
So, when I told my father that, look, the show is kind | :09:07. | :09:10. | |
of about you and me and he was excited. | :09:11. | :09:12. | |
I said hold on, I have to tell you something you're dead | :09:13. | :09:16. | |
at the beginning of the show and he said, "you've killed me off | :09:17. | :09:19. | |
already and not even dead in real life." | :09:20. | :09:22. | |
So he was taken aback by that, but it's very much about my, | :09:23. | :09:25. | |
about how my father or how fathers from a different culture, | :09:26. | :09:30. | |
when they're in another environment, they start to question | :09:31. | :09:34. | |
what they want their children, which direction they want them to be... | :09:35. | :09:39. | |
He kept on saying to me when I was a teenager, | :09:40. | :09:42. | |
I was imitating a lot of Michael Jackson, Bruce Lee, | :09:43. | :09:47. | |
all these people who were my superheroes, and he said, | :09:48. | :09:50. | |
I still to this day don't know what that means. | :09:51. | :09:57. | |
It was really something in his own mind that he believed in. | :09:58. | :10:01. | |
Partly you are exploring your relationship to him, but in terms | :10:02. | :10:04. | |
of your own relationship with the culture you grew up | :10:05. | :10:07. | |
in in London and then in the dance world in the West, | :10:08. | :10:11. | |
but also very regularly visiting Bangladesh. | :10:12. | :10:15. | |
Did you mean, and do you feel like an outsider, actually, | :10:16. | :10:18. | |
I never felt an outsider in Britain as much as when Brexit happened. | :10:19. | :10:28. | |
In Bangladesh I always felt like an outsider. | :10:29. | :10:33. | |
I feel more British when I'm in Bangladesh and I feel more | :10:34. | :10:37. | |
Bangladeshi when I'm in Britain, so for me it's about no borders, | :10:38. | :10:43. | |
really, a home is where for me, where family is and where | :10:44. | :10:47. | |
I'm interested that you say you never felt more of an outsider | :10:48. | :10:54. | |
in the UK than you do today, because just from reading things | :10:55. | :10:58. | |
that you said in the past there were difficult experiences | :10:59. | :11:00. | |
Your father's restaurant sometimes was visited by pretty | :11:01. | :11:04. | |
Yes, we went through a really bad period. | :11:05. | :11:09. | |
And I think many people from the Bangladeshi community | :11:10. | :11:11. | |
and others would say, actually there is less | :11:12. | :11:13. | |
overt racism today then there was back then, | :11:14. | :11:15. | |
I wonder why you feel more of an outsider now? | :11:16. | :11:20. | |
With Brexit I think things are changing. | :11:21. | :11:25. | |
I think that racism has an open door now, somehow, a bigger voice, | :11:26. | :11:28. | |
the sense of creating walls with other cultures, | :11:29. | :11:32. | |
xenophobia, fear of the other, fear of the foreigner, from me a lot | :11:33. | :11:38. | |
You weave that into the stuff you are doing. | :11:39. | :11:50. | |
Because that's my reality, I explore things that happen to me | :11:51. | :11:54. | |
Coming back to the point about mash up and fusion, | :11:55. | :12:01. | |
and want to bring in another clip because it seems so relevant | :12:02. | :12:05. | |
You took a classical ballet, Giselle, you worked | :12:06. | :12:15. | |
with the English National Ballet and gave it a contemporary twist. | :12:16. | :12:17. | |
When you talk about walls and talk about immigrants coming | :12:18. | :12:23. | |
you re-imagined a love story taking place with Giselle | :12:24. | :12:27. | |
who is active garment worker, a very poor girl and let's | :12:28. | :12:29. | |
just look at the imagery that comes from your Giselle. | :12:30. | :12:42. | |
Again, stunning images, very different from the clip | :12:43. | :12:46. | |
What was it like working with the English National Ballet | :12:47. | :12:51. | |
and with Tamara Rojo who is one of the great contemporary dancers? | :12:52. | :12:54. | |
It was extraordinary, I mean, you know, particularly working | :12:55. | :12:59. | |
with the English National Ballet, I have not worked with | :13:00. | :13:02. | |
other ballet companies, and English National Ballet, | :13:03. | :13:07. | |
I was always apprehensive of working with a ballet company... | :13:08. | :13:10. | |
To what you were bringing which is probably very different | :13:11. | :13:15. | |
to everything they have worked with before. | :13:16. | :13:17. | |
That is why I was apprehensive about if they would be open. | :13:18. | :13:20. | |
They were extraordinarly gernerous and really daring, | :13:21. | :13:22. | |
they really support of the entire process and kudos to | :13:23. | :13:31. | |
Tamara and her team, they are extraordinary. | :13:32. | :13:34. | |
It has a lot of weight, so I could feel the weight. | :13:35. | :13:40. | |
And Giselle is a very loved piece, and it's | :13:41. | :13:44. | |
So, to take it and then have the audacity to... | :13:45. | :13:49. | |
I was going to say, you said very modestly at the beginning | :13:50. | :13:59. | |
of the interview the secret was you weren't very talented | :14:00. | :14:01. | |
I don't think anybody watching that would believe that, | :14:02. | :14:03. | |
Could you imagine now, you're so experienced | :14:04. | :14:07. | |
in the world of dance, if you had gone in a different | :14:08. | :14:10. | |
direction, could you have been a classical ballet dancer? | :14:11. | :14:12. | |
I don't think so, I used to love Nureyev and Baryshnikov, | :14:13. | :14:18. | |
they were also one of my heroes, both of them were extraordinary | :14:19. | :14:21. | |
ballet dancers and I always dreamed of being like them. | :14:22. | :14:26. | |
Personally, I don't have the body for it, | :14:27. | :14:32. | |
I don't have the flexibility, but it depends because maybe | :14:33. | :14:35. | |
as a child perhaps if I had started early enough, | :14:36. | :14:38. | |
but, you know Nureyev started much later, but still, I mean, | :14:39. | :14:41. | |
So, you use your body in a very different way. | :14:42. | :14:46. | |
I'm interested in that, I'd like you to determine | :14:47. | :14:53. | |
-- tell me a little bit about how, the mechanics of how you tell | :14:54. | :14:58. | |
What are the great gifts that you need, what kind of flexibility | :14:59. | :15:02. | |
and what kind of expression can get out of your body? | :15:03. | :15:05. | |
For me, the flexibility idea with is an illusion, | :15:06. | :15:07. | |
I don't truly have an immense range at all, physically, but I'm fast, | :15:08. | :15:15. | |
that is one thing I've always been, because of my training in Kathak | :15:16. | :15:20. | |
because you have to wear these very heavy belts around your ankles | :15:21. | :15:24. | |
and you train for hours and it is like having | :15:25. | :15:26. | |
The moment you take them off you're like Speedy Gonzales. | :15:27. | :15:32. | |
So, I think, also fear, fear of revealing I'm not flexible, | :15:33. | :15:39. | |
So, things will become a blur, so you would be | :15:40. | :15:44. | |
And, so in a way my stylistic development came out | :15:45. | :15:54. | |
of the necessity of hiding what I was not good at. | :15:55. | :15:59. | |
Well, when you tell me about the things you took | :16:00. | :16:04. | |
from your Kathak tradition, it also reminds me that on this | :16:05. | :16:08. | |
journey of yours through different dance traditions and fusing things | :16:09. | :16:11. | |
together you have, in recent years, gone quite regularly to India | :16:12. | :16:14. | |
and I guess to Bangladesh, as well to put on some shows | :16:15. | :16:17. | |
and I know, that there has been a resistance to you. | :16:18. | :16:23. | |
People felt you had betrayed the tradition, but that | :16:24. | :16:26. | |
seems to have changed, because now you get huge acclaim | :16:27. | :16:29. | |
They now more open minded, do you think? | :16:30. | :16:35. | |
I think, always the traditionalists will be a little bit negative | :16:36. | :16:43. | |
or a bit difficult, with absorbing what I do or accepting what I do. | :16:44. | :16:48. | |
But, it has changed and got a lot better. | :16:49. | :16:51. | |
I have to say the younger generation are amazing, | :16:52. | :16:53. | |
In India it's so exciting, I love performing in India | :16:54. | :16:57. | |
Dance strikes me as, I guess I said it in the introduction, | :16:58. | :17:02. | |
it's such a sort of elemental art form, because in the end | :17:03. | :17:05. | |
you are communicating through your body and I can see that | :17:06. | :17:07. | |
one of the implications of that is that as you age, | :17:08. | :17:11. | |
and as your body becomes perhaps, you know, less powerful, | :17:12. | :17:13. | |
less potent, it affects your ability to tell stories and express | :17:14. | :17:16. | |
I would say, technically yes, I think, you know, it depends | :17:17. | :17:24. | |
if you look at it from a Western perspective or an eastern, | :17:25. | :17:33. | |
In Kathak the real masters are when they are at their | :17:34. | :17:46. | |
Everything else before that is preparation. | :17:47. | :17:50. | |
I think in western classical dance form it is much earlier because, | :17:51. | :17:57. | |
it's not just about having strength it's about knowing how to use that | :17:58. | :18:03. | |
strength in a poetic way and a deeper way. | :18:04. | :18:09. | |
For me, the older I become the less, of course I have to abandon | :18:10. | :18:15. | |
the reality that my body cannot do some of the things that I would love | :18:16. | :18:20. | |
to do when I was 30, but then I find other things | :18:21. | :18:23. | |
and I find other ways to express that same movement. | :18:24. | :18:30. | |
You do less dancing now and probably more... | :18:31. | :18:37. | |
Right, so you have to actually train more. | :18:38. | :18:49. | |
The reason why I think it is important, when discussing | :18:50. | :18:53. | |
dance, to get into the physicality of it, is because it is so important | :18:54. | :18:57. | |
and you'd said, and they think there were three of you, | :18:58. | :18:59. | |
leading to in contemporary dance in the UK he wrote | :19:00. | :19:02. | |
a letter not long ago, an open letter, saying that the, | :19:03. | :19:05. | |
as far as you were concerned the new generation of young, | :19:06. | :19:08. | |
contemporary dancers in the UK were not disciplined enough, | :19:09. | :19:11. | |
not hungry enough, not training hard enough to be the very best and that | :19:12. | :19:17. | |
a lot of the best young dancers you could see and that | :19:18. | :19:20. | |
you want to work within your own company were actually | :19:21. | :19:23. | |
We were talking more specifically about the training, | :19:24. | :19:28. | |
perhaps selfishly geared toward our company's work, | :19:29. | :19:31. | |
so I always needed very strong, technical dancers, and I felt that | :19:32. | :19:38. | |
at that time, the dancers that I was singing coming out | :19:39. | :19:47. | |
of the colleges were not geared towards the kind of dancers I was | :19:48. | :19:52. | |
looking for and perhaps the same for the other two choreographers. | :19:53. | :19:55. | |
It's not a basic hunger thing, you're not saying that | :19:56. | :19:57. | |
With so many different forms of entertainment and art and culture | :19:58. | :20:02. | |
around them are not dedicating themselves to dance in the way that | :20:03. | :20:06. | |
I think in any form if you really want to have a profound impact on it | :20:07. | :20:16. | |
you have do become obsessed by it and I do believe, deep down, | :20:17. | :20:22. | |
that whatever technique it is, it has two inprison you, | :20:23. | :20:27. | |
you have to learn it so much, you have to learn about it so much, | :20:28. | :20:34. | |
you have to do it so much that eventually that imprisonment, | :20:35. | :20:36. | |
you find freedom out of that imprisonment, you find freedom out | :20:37. | :20:40. | |
of that form that you have been trying to perfect. | :20:41. | :20:42. | |
But, it means you go through an awful lot | :20:43. | :20:44. | |
Yes, pain of course, but everything is pain, | :20:45. | :20:48. | |
anything is hard work, if you want to be good at anything | :20:49. | :20:51. | |
you have to work hard, you have to sacrifice stuff | :20:52. | :20:53. | |
and you if you feel it is a sacrifice then | :20:54. | :20:56. | |
If you consider you, to be where you are, | :20:57. | :21:03. | |
you had to put in many, many hours of work, | :21:04. | :21:09. | |
you have to do it, you have to go through it. | :21:10. | :21:11. | |
What now, then, for you, because you do an awful | :21:12. | :21:14. | |
I'm just going to make other people go through it now. | :21:15. | :21:18. | |
I'm done doing it. Going through the pain. | :21:19. | :21:23. | |
You mean, you're seriously contemplating quitting | :21:24. | :21:25. | |
I think and slowly winding down, yes, for sure, | :21:26. | :21:28. | |
Maybe a few more years and then I may do a small role, | :21:29. | :21:33. | |
But, I love to dance for my children, you know, | :21:34. | :21:39. | |
I love to dance in the living room, I love, these days, the training | :21:40. | :21:43. | |
part is the bit that I don't like any more, | :21:44. | :21:45. | |
used to love it before but it hurt so much. | :21:46. | :21:48. | |
It's like running, when you were born at 20, | :21:49. | :21:51. | |
it's different to anyone at 30, go for a jog, the spring changes | :21:52. | :21:54. | |
the way you run changes, and when you run at 40 it's | :21:55. | :22:05. | |
different from the way you run at 30, you feel it, and so, | :22:06. | :22:08. | |
I feel a huge different is what I felt at 20 and 30, | :22:09. | :22:11. | |
so I enjoy the performance part of it but not the training part | :22:12. | :22:14. | |
I just wonder whether you're going to be happy when you have quit | :22:15. | :22:19. | |
dancing professionally, because you've said, | :22:20. | :22:20. | |
sometimes you feel overwhelmed with the amount of stuff, | :22:21. | :22:22. | |
politics, administration that comes with running a company and doing | :22:23. | :22:24. | |
all of the stuff that means that you can get your shows around | :22:25. | :22:27. | |
the world, but not actually involving you dancing on the stage. | :22:28. | :22:32. | |
If that becomes your life, will you find that deeply frustrating? | :22:33. | :22:35. | |
I think I will, but I will still keep dancing in the privacy | :22:36. | :22:39. | |
I love to explore the ideas that I cannot do in my own body | :22:40. | :22:47. | |
Like working with English National Ballet, their extraordinary ability | :22:48. | :22:51. | |
facility that they have, pushes the language further and, | :22:52. | :22:54. | |
they come already with a very solid training of ballet so this kind | :22:55. | :23:04. | |
of connection between what I do and at the ballet body, | :23:05. | :23:08. | |
And what women can do one point, it's just extraordinary, | :23:09. | :23:15. | |
I've seen it before, but until you work with them | :23:16. | :23:17. | |
directly you truly, really, you really respect it because it's | :23:18. | :23:21. | |
What it did was transform the material that I usually create | :23:22. | :23:28. | |
To end, any thoughts on the next big sort of theme | :23:29. | :23:36. | |
You've talked a lot about immigration and though walls | :23:37. | :23:43. | |
that people build between cultures, what's the big theme that | :23:44. | :23:46. | |
Definitely the body, but I'm interested in the mythological body, | :23:47. | :23:51. | |
Akram Khan, it's been a pleasure to have you on HARDtalk, | :23:52. | :24:32. | |
Hello. Here's the latest live weather update from BBC | :24:33. | :24:34. |