Catch him while you Khan in his last big solo show
Taking its name from the Greek for “foreigner” or “stranger”,
Xenos – getting its UK premiere this week at Sadler’s Wells – sees Akram Khan mark the end of the First World War just as his 2014 piece Dust did its beginning. The piece is chiefly an empathetic tribute to the 4.5million non-british soldiers (including
1.5 million Indians) who died fighting for Britain during the war. But it’s also a pointed rebuke to the suspicion of outsiders that has become such a prevalent trait of our times.
At its centre is Khan, as a (fictional, composite) soldier who was a dancer before the war. As you take your seats, a percussionist and singer (both excellent) are already filling the room with a classical Indian lament. Behind them is a large, menacing, ramp like the exaggerated lip of a trench. Down its side, like streams of lava on a volcano, lie dozens of ropes, each one ominously looped at its end.
Coming across as the nightmare of a traumatised soldier on the Western Front, the piece properly starts when Khan comes on and begins to dance. These are the soldier’s memories of performing at a high-society house party, and as such, this is the evening’s purest passage of the north-indian Kathak dance in which Khan originally trained.
He performs this with all the meticulous poise and poetry you would expect of him, but these recollections are, of course, atrociously tainted. Shell-shocked shudders and collapses creep in, as rumbling explosions begin erupting from the speakers and the score picks up punishing momentum (Vincenzo Lamagna’s music and sound-design are expertly judged).
Soon, in the first of several brilliant deployments of the set, Michael Hulls’s superb lighting takes on a crueller edge, and those many ropes begin to climb up the ramp as if pulled by some malign, invisible, irresistible force. They take with them everything at the front of the stage – tables, chairs, the frantically struggling Khan, and presumably the soldier’s previous entire existence – over the top, and down into the abyss.
A triumph of collaboration, the entire piece radiates this sort of magic-realist, borderline surreal logic. It’s not long before we hear some of the names of those 1.5million “sepoys”, seemingly emerging from the horn of an old-fashioned gramophone perched on the lip of the ramp; at the end, that same horn becomes a searchlight, implacably but also forlornly scanning the audience.
Throughout, Khan aptly weaves little threads of Kathak into a chiefly Western-contemporary idiom, and delivers a performance of electrifying intensity. It would be remarkable in a dancer two decades his junior. That Khan can still serve up such a banquet of movement with this kind of panache is genuinely astonishing.
As for the climax, surprise is key, but I will say that it paints the experiences of the soldier as a tiny part of a colossal canvas, generating an unforgettably vivid and poignant image of the Great War’s apocalyptic human wastage. Plaudits especially (and as throughout) to dramaturge Ruth Little and designer Mirella Weingarten.
At time of writing, there are just three tickets in total available for the remaining seven performances, but I urge you to try for returns if you can. Khan says that Xenos is the last substantial solo work that he will ever create for himself, so catch him while you can.
Until June 9. Details: 020 7863 8000; sadlerswells.com