Published in Attitude: The Dancers Magazine, Summer 2008
Food for thought arose before the performance of Akram Khan’s zero degrees even began: we in the audience pondered the significance of two inanimate dummies posed on either side of a stage populated with not much else excepted a wash of light. Soon the lights came up behind the upstage scrim, revealing four living humans. They were the evening’s musicians, and in the dangling pause they stared back, silent, intent, making us feel a bit as if we were the show.
It made me think of all the things we witness as we chug through our days—the little atrocities, like the guy who cuts the supermarket line, or the bigger ones, like homelessness. Our newspapers are filled with tales of property foreclosure and an administration that willfully fabricates lies to justify a war. Our outcries are weak: rather than storm the barricades, we often look the other way, an act of self-protection to temporarily keep the clouds at bay, preserve the peace of our own private Idahoes.
In zero degrees, Khan’s stunning, compact work on view at New York’s City Center this April, issues of power, control and abuse were explored, as Khan shined a light on the whims of bureaucrats, and the individual in society. How we conduct ourselves in extraordinary circumstances, how morality guides our actions, how we build bridges instead of walls: all of it matters, Khan wants us to know.
The evening takes its structure from a spoken story whose threads interspersed with movement that alternately comments, and reveals an explosive narrative of its own. Often speaking in unison, Khan and the remarkable Sidi Cherkaoui related a comic/horrific experience of third-world travel (based on Khan’s real-life experience), a Kafka-esque journey of race and class-centric paranoia in a land where the rights of the individual carry little, or no weight.
Their twin voices, reverberant with the accents of their origins (Khan, of Bengali heritage, was born in London, Cherkaoui in Antwerp, the son of a Flemish mother and a Moroccan father), played like harmonies in a single song of discord and fear. An encounter with sadistic border guards who attempt to confiscate their passports echoed recent incidents of power unchecked: Guantanamo Bay, Ahu Gharib to name but a few.
What followed that account was a thing of beauty. The dancers faced each other, their arms engaged in a ballet of undulating caresses that filled the space between them with an aura of discovery and awe. Soon those arms lost their probing gentleness, propelling Khan and Cherkaoui into a series of concentric spins, axeling their bodies around the stage and each other like atoms hurtling through space—one moment, heedless of collusion, the next, warily tracking the other as if to say, “careful, I know you’re there.”
The stalking didn’t last long: floating reveries escalated to hard aggression as the gentle mesmeric arms turned to weapons filled with force and speed. Legs kicked and tripped, bodies rolled in evasive flurries that transcended martial arts. It was the first of many chapters in a quest for power, as these flashes of virtuosity from Khan and Cherkaoui welled like unexpected storms: at points they’d break, one pacing as the other regrouped, their bodies heaving with all-too-human exertion.
The other “figures” on stage joined the action after Khan recalled an episode where a passenger dies during the train trip from Bangledesh to India—this act of witnessing prompts a warning from Khan’s cousin not to touch the body, lest he risk accusations of murder: “They will blame you,” cries his frightened relative. Designed by sculptor Antony Gormley (and cast from the dancer’s own bodies), these dummies shift the evening’s tone by creating physical relationships that occupy that discomforting space between comedy and tragedy. I will not soon forget the poignant ministrations of Cherkaoui as he encouraged the likeness of Khan to rub his head, caress his face or embrace him; moments later, this fine performer—the word “dancer” feels inadequate to describe what he accomplishes here—lashes out brutally, comically, in a sequence where each blow to the dummy elicited a physical spasm from the real Khan. It’s a disturbing, complicit moment between performer, audience and story: the dummies provided a distance that made it easy for us to respond in every way except the genuine outrage such a violent depiction warranted. Our laughter was laced with the rue of our own indifference.
By virtue of their opposing essences, Khan and Cherkaoui illustrated the gulf, or distance between. Khan is a bullet of a dancer, his smoldering face a defiant mask of fury as he slices through space shattering the air around him. The slender, pale, pretzel-like Cherkaoui is the water to Khan’s fire, magnetic as he spun from humor to pathos. Their struggle to reach across the divide—zero degrees refers to the space in between, that suspended realm between polar opposites—could be interpreted as the attempt of two disparate dancers seeking a common movement vocabulary. In a late-evening pas de deuxthat began with Cherkaoui dancing on pointe, before joining Khan in a sequence of Kathak foot-slapping (the classical, sometimes improvised dance form of Northern India in which the steps literally tell a story), both illuminated how individuals are like countries, and how our walls must come down if we are ever to know one another.
One of zero degrees enduring images occurs towards the end. Cherkaoui has engaged the bodies of Khan and their doppegangers in a Sisyphean series of pulls and lifts that taxed him to the breaking point. With one arm being “pulled” by a dummy, he turns his large brimming eyes to us as he extends his free arm. Help me the gesture implored. Witnessing his despair, I wanted to leap out of my seat and do just that.