More Than Zero

Flemish-Moroccan Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui was the choreographer of my beloved Foi and Tempus Fugit for Les Ballets C de la B. Akram Khan is a British Bangladeshi choreographer who fuses classical Indian kathak with the forms of western contemporary dance. Both have trained at Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's dance-theatre education project P.A.R.T.S. Both hail from migrant Muslim backgrounds, and they exemplify the power of multicultural cross-fertilization. Their mutual fascination finally comes to fruition in the excellent Zero Degrees, a collaboration not only with each other but also sculptor Antony Gormley and musician Nitin Sawney.

This is no easy synthesis; each creator has his own pronounced style, and their conjunction is far from smooth. The piece's power draws as much from the recognition of difference as the coalescence of similarity, but power it certainly has. Both austere and self-indulgent, it hits the mark of beauty time and time again, uplifting one moment, heartbreaking the next.

Khan and Cherkaoui comprise the company as well the directors, two dancers at each other's beck and call; and such dancers. They move like angels, taking on one another's choreographic language as if born to it, always fluid, fearless and precise. It's not that you can't see the joins -- many sequences clearly belong to one artist or the other -- but that the combination of the two is so clearly greater than the sum of the parts.

There's one more night yet of this run, and there will be further performances elsewhere. It is touring, Khan mentioned in the long post-performance talk, to India and Bangladesh, and it will return to London in early 2006. It's a triumph. If you get the chance -- I always say this, almost certainly without effect, but I mean it -- if you get the chance, go see it.
Posted by matt at July 15, 2005 10:35 PM