Please click here and read UK media’s review of Bahok.

Please click here and watch the video clip of Bahok live performance.

Bahok Lecture and Rehearsal
Lecture:  UK Producer Mr Farooq Chaudhry talks on the role of the Producer in Dance and Arts Management
Speaker: Farooq Chaudhry (UK)
Time: 4pm-5.45pm Wed 23 Jan 2008  
Venue: Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy
Address: 4/F Landmark Building Tower 1, 8 North Dongsanhuan Rd, Chaoyang District, 100004, Beijing, China

Topics to cover:

• When and how his partnership with Akram Khan company started
• The roles of producer & choreogropher and how they work together
• How to be an enterpreneur
• How can dance companies look into future and how to seek opportunities

Bahok dress rehearsal:
Bahok is a China-UK collaborative dance between the National Ballet of China and Akram Khan Dance Company. As the co-producer of this dance work, we organised a visit to the rehearsal at Tianqiao Theatre for all the participants right after the talk. Transportation was arranged for this purpose.
Rehearsal time: 7.30-9.00pm
Date: Wed 23 Jan 2008
Venue: Tianqiao Theatre

Introduction of Farooq Chaudhry
Farooq Chaudhry was born in Pakistan. After graduating from the London Contemporary Dance School in 1986 he worked in a variety of dance media including contemporary dance, opera, film, pop videos, pop tour, and musical theatre. In 1988 he was awarded an Asian Achievement Award for his work in dance. In the early 1990s he moved to Europe where he worked in Germany, Holland, France and Belgium. In 1998 he moved back to London after finishing his professional dance career with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Company Rosas. In 1999 he completed an MA in Arts Management from City University. He followed his studies with a traineeship at the London based dance management agency independence after which he created his own agency dansoffice. In December 1999 he teamed up with Akram Khan with whom he set up the Akram Khan Company in August 2000. He continues to work with Akram Khan as his Producer.  He is also currently a “Project Champion” for Arts Council England’s Cultural Leadership Programme as well as member of the DCMS Dance Forum.

Collaboration between Akram Khan Company and the National Ballet of China

“For nomads, home is not an address,
home is what they carry with them.”
(John Berger, Hold everything dear. p. 129)

bahok
Full-length work
Duration: 75 minutes without interval
Equal billing: Akram Khan Company/National Ballet of China
WORLD PREMIERE: 25 - 27 January 2008 in Beijing, China
Ticket hotline: +86 010 63535709 (9AM-5PM)
Ticket price: RMB 180, 280, 380, 480, 680, 880

Bahok is the long awaited new group choreography by Akram Khan.

After the more intimate duets with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (zero degrees) and Sylvie Guillem (Sacred Monsters), Akram Khan again joins forces with long-time collaborators, acclaimed writer Hanif Kureishi and multi award-winning composer Nitin Sawhney, and has brought together a new company of nine dancers. A collaboration with China’s classical ballet flagship company, the National Ballet of China, the dancers come from different cultures, traditions and dance backgrounds: Chinese, Korean, Indian, South-African and Spanish. As such they resemble a present day version of the tale of Babel. Being a community that wants to create together a utopian project but speaking both with their bodies and tongues different languages.

They meet in one of this globalised world’s transit zones and try to communicate, to share ‘the things they carry with them’: their experiences, their memories of their original homes, the dreams and aspirations that made them move. They are carriers. They are Bahok.

4 dancers from the National Ballet will work with 5 dancers of Akram Khan Company. Nitin Sawhney will compose the music for Chinese and Indian instrumentation, and a contemporary Chinese Visual artist will design the scenery and costumes.

Work will focus on the dynamics of modern China. There will be no reference to traditional China i.e. silk and colour red. Akram will not suppress the classical technique of the Chinese ballet dancers, therefore they will remain on point. There is also intention to introduce elements of Chinese folk dancing and Kathak, as well as western/modern and classical dance vocabulary. Bahok will be a pure movement work. Akram will not dance in this production.

Research will begin in summer 2007, and rehearsals will begin in London in November 2007. In January, the company will travel to China to continue rehearsals and the world premiere will take place in Beijing on 25-27 January 2008. The work will premiere in UK in Liverpool – European Capital of Culture 2008 – in March 2008.

Co-producers:
Sadlers Wells Theatre, London
British Council
The Liverpool Culture Company with Merseyside Dance Initiative
Birmingham Dance Exchange
Theatre de La Ville, Paris
Tanzhaus NRW Dusseldorf
National Arts Center, Ottawa
China Now, London

Supported by:
Arts Council England
The Cultural Leadership Programme
(The Cultural Leadership Programme is a joint programme between Arts Council England, Creative & Cultural Skills and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council.)

Touring party
Up to 13: 9 dancers plus 2 technical staff, tour manager and producer. Could be less.

Kaash (2002)
Premiere: 28 of March 2002, Creteil (France)
Duration: 55 minutes

‘It is important that we remind ourselves of the value of that which we cannot touch. Is it not true that the empty space inside the cup is what renders it useful? Similarly, the stillness between steps, the spaces between musical phrases and the empty spaces in space itself contain all the mysteries of their eventual forms.’

Royal Festival Hall choreographer in residence Akram Khan teams up with the celebrated talents of Anish Kapoor (set design) and Nitin Sawhney (composer) to present his company’s first full length evening work Kaash (Hindi word for “if”). “Hindu Gods, black holes, Indian time cycles, tablas, creation and destruction” are the starting points for this new work for 2002. Danced by a five - strong international cast of performers, Kaash continues Akram Khan’s quest to build bridges between the worlds of contemporary dance and the Indian classical dance form Kathak.

Artistic Direction and Choreography by Akram Khan
Composer Nitin Sawhney
Additional Music “Spectre” by John Oswald played by The Kronos Quartet
Set Designer Anish Kapoor
Light Designer Aideen Malone
Costumes Designer Saeunn Huld

Dancers:
Rachel Krische (until August 2003)
Akram Khan
Moya Michael
Inn Pang Ooi
Shanell Winlock
Eulalia Ayguade Farro (after August 2003)

Dance material devised in collaboration with the dancers.

Co- Producers: The South Bank Centre, The Tramway, The Vooruit, Sampad, DanceEast, and Maison Des Arts Creteil. Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University with support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

kaash has also been created with generous support from The Quercus Trust, The Jerwood Space and Birmingham DanceXchange.

Media Review

The Independent on Sunday
19 May 2002
It’s easy to be in awe of Khan’s skin-flaying bursts of speed, but his stillnesses are near miraculous.
Jenny Gilbert

Financial Times
17 May 2002
Superlatives are in order. Not since Mark Morris emerged in the mid 1980s have I seen any dancer-choreographer so able, so accomplished; and in certain ways Khan’s sheer mastery is more awesome. There are some quintet’s in Kaash that are the most sophisticated since Merce Cunningham…
Alastair Macaulay

The Times
15 May 2002
Khan’s barefoot choreography, for himself and four other dancers, bursts out of the starting gate faster than a bullet, arms powering the dancers’ bodies like competitive swimmers heading for the finish line. The choreography strives for perfection and rigour, building its absolutes with regimental precision.
Debra Craine

The Independent
15 May 2002
The dance, the coloured projections by the Turner Prize-winner Anish Kapoor; the score by Nitin Sawhney and the lighting by Aideen Malone mesh together to hit you head-on and resound in your mind long after.

The effect is so richly theatrical that by the end you feel as if you have lived a whole drama, even though there is no narrative.

Khan manages the tricky balance of forging a new language that looks updated but loses none of its old density. He streamlines, but he also extends. He returns to Kathak’s traditional spins and arms, but fragments them like retrieved memories, or tilts or otherwise transmutes them. He laces in new movement, introducing floor-hugging rolls and crouches, and variously etched poses and group patterns. The dancers hit the beat of the drums as in Kathak, but just as often they rebelliously weave around it.

Nadine Meisner

The Daily Telegraph
14 May 2002
… Kaash is epic, deeply focused and grandly beautiful…
Ismene Brown

The Guardian
13 May 2002
It is like watching the aftermath of the Big Bang, with Khan’s choreography as the fallout. He and his four dancers occupy the stage like a collective force field, fracturing and reforming their tight little groupings, wheeling across the stage like sheet lightning. They are a complex equation of pure mass, pure speed, pure energy. But at the same time they are also making a thrilling commentary on the music: their limbs slice through the dense mathematics of the percussion and their flickering gestures decorate its surface.
Judith Mackrell

Evening Standard
13 May 2002
Turner Prize winning sculptor Anish Kapoor (with lighting designer Aideen Malone) produced a fascinating set, a hypnotic colour field that seemed to exert a physical pull on the audience, drawing us inexorably into the depths of space. Nitin Sawhney’s pounding, driving, rhythmic score was equally powerful, punching you in the solar plexus and making your bones vibrate.
Sarah Frater

Photo credit: Dancer Sun Chia-Ying; photographer: Liu Chen-Hsiang