Renowned dancer and choreographer Akram Khan has returned to stage after a gap of several years with GIGENIS: The generation of the Earth, a work that goes deep into Indian classical dance forms and rebuilds the human connection to the planet that has been severed in the modern world.
GIGENIS is the highlight show of this year’s Kalaa Utsavam (November 15-24, 2024), the annual Indian festival of performing arts in Singapore, presented by Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay.
Speaking to Connected to India about what brought him back to stage after a hiatus, Akram Khan says, “I’m seduced by these dancers and musicians.”
Globally renowned, with a career of 24 years in dance, the UK-based Akram Khan did 100+ shows a year for a long, long time. Then something shifted in him — it was a desire to spend more time with his children, and also a discomfort with a culture that turned the art form of dance into a time-bound job.
“The stage doesn’t seduce me anymore; it’s people, the artistes that seduce me,” says Akram, a Kathak exponent by training whose work straddles Indian classical dance, contemporary dance, and Western classical ballet. “I’m very comfortable in the studio, I’m very comfortable to sit outside the stage and… not just comfortable… I get most excited by creating, and exploring, and questioning. That’s really where my heart belongs.”
All of these are at the core of GIGENIS. It began not as a production centred around Akram Khan, but as an idea of taking the power and beauty of Indian classical dance to a wider audience.
Akram and his dear friend, Malaysian dancer and Bharatanatyam exponent Mavin Khoo, were in India for a masterclass in late 2022. The project, titled ‘Seeking Satori’, brought together Kathak and Bharatanatyam dancers, helped them to look at their art through a different lens and to completely believe in what they did.
Satori, derived from the Japanese verb “satoru”, is a Japanese Buddhist term that can be interpreted as “awakening”, “comprehension” or “understanding”. The word is also connected to a state of deep experience: kenshō, or “seeing into one’s true nature”.
During this masterclass in Indian, Akram found the artistes who would eventually perform in GIGENIS.
In the short documentary film made on the masterclass, we see Kutiyattam dancer and actor Kapila Venu perform, her movements slow, and extremely precise and controlled, her facial expression radiating power. Then we see Akram tell his listeners how the performance impacted him: “Her conviction forced me to slow my time, my brain, down. It takes time. I didn’t want to. I was resisting her time. But what seduces you is her conviction. It took me half an hour. And then the last 15 minutes for me was bliss. That’s when you discovered satori. You’re seeking satori, [and] at that moment, you feel the satori.”
Slowing down of time, reversing the frenetic pace driven by technology, and restoring the connections we have with each other, with nature, is Akram’s aim. The experience of “deep time” is what he wants — for himself and his audience and those who will come after him.
“The most important thing that I want to pass on, through those [Indian classical dance and music] forms is the notion of deep time, which I don’t get in normal life, [and] definitely don’t get on TikTok, and [in] modern day life, and modern day forms of music and dance,” he says. “It’s very tailored to an artificial cut-up sense of time.”
“But deep time, ocean time, life and death time, cyclical time, nature time, feminine time, Eastern time, ritualistic time, seasonal time — all of these times exist in Indian music and dance. And I want my children to experience that,” he tells us.
The germination of GIGENIS began in Akram’s mind from the moment he went over the idea with his friend, a top French producer “who hosts huge orchestras, music and dance, mostly ballet… and contemporary dance”.
Following the ‘Seeking Satori’ masterclass, which revealed the great depth of dance and music talent in India, Akram first envisaged a week-long festival of performing arts, and then transformed that into GIGENIS.
Having debuted at the Grand Théâtre de Provence, Aix-en-Provence in France, at the end of August 2024, the production is touring the world, with dates announced up to April 2025 for venues in Europe and the United States.
This makes the Kalaa Utsavam staging of GIGENIS a unique opportunity for the Asian audience, as this production comes to Singapore even before Sadler’s Wells in London, a performing arts space with which Akram Khan is very closely connected.
He tells us, “In my 24 years of directing and choreographing, this is the first time I am directing a collection of artistes who are steeped in Indian music and dance — and I’ve learnt so much from it. So, yes, it’s a production, an actual production that I direct, but I didn’t choreograph it.”
The dancers in GIGENIS “are the authors, the choreographers of their own form”, he says. “What I have done is I’ve clawed at it, I’ve torn it apart, I’ve dissected it, to understand [it]… and I’ve planted a seed that will grow through all our stories, to become a tree, hopefully. And that tree is GIGENIS. And in that tree live different species.”
