AKRAM Khan is a seminal figure in the world of dance.

An acclaimed choreographer and dancer, Khan combines classical Indian dance with contemporary styles as he intertwines the two with tender complexity to create something new and innovative.

This marriage of the traditional and the modern is evident throughout his latest production coming to the Brighton Festival, which has been hailed as both intimate and epic as it deconstructs a two millennia old manuscript the Mahabharata.

Khan adapts poet Karthika Naïr’s reworking of a section the ancient text taken from her book Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata.

With two dancers and four musicians, Khan tells the tale of Amba, a princess who is abducted on her wedding day and who calls on the gods carry out her revenge.

“I was introduced to the collection of poems based on female characters from the Mahabharata,” Khan says. “It is something I have always been fascinated with so it seemed like an ideal marriage to use them as inspiration and basis for a production focused on one particular female character.”

In the legend, Amba is abducted by the prince Bhishma, who proceeds to defeat her lover Salva in a duel.

After pleading with the prince Amba is returned to Salva, but after his disgrace her true love rejects her.

Fraught with rage Amba swears to destroy Bhishma and blames him for her troubles, vowing revenge.

However, after descending into asceticism she commits suicide, only to be reborn as Shikhandi, a girl who transformed into a boy to do battle with Bhishma.

“Female characters in mythology have always been a fascination of mine and gender is something I am curious about,” Khan says. “The crossing between gender is something dance allows and it is a concept we are exploring with Amba.

“I think gender issues have always been relevant, not just now, it is something at all times.”

The choreography sees the more masculine contemporary dance still seamlessly mixed with the more feminine and fluid traditional Indian kathak style, something which Khan has practised since he was seven-years-old.

The dance itself is built around a soundscape which features both music and storytelling, building a narrative into the structure of the choreography.

“The production develops in bits,” says Khan. “What I try to do is spend around a year with the collaborates, working closely with the lighting designer, the composer, the visuals and the dancers.

“We collected things that might have been inspired by stories of love, betrayal and revenge and then after about a year we play – we try things out with thinking and explore the concepts.

“This first play sessions is all about conceptualising the world we want to create. The second playtime is to explore the physicality of it, and the third is the main session.”

As the idea grows based on Nair’s poetry, Khan says adapting the stanzas and verse into physical movement is something which is perfectly natural.

“Poetry is something which lends itself to dance as there sense of ambiguity. It is not like a script, it is a poem which reaches into philosophy and the spiritual sphere.”

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