On paper, Akram Khan's latest work sounded poised between dream and nightmare. Not only was this 55-minute project designed to incorporate the creative egos of British-Asian collaborators Nitin Sawhney (music) and Anish Kapoor (visuals), it had also been given a massive cargo of ideas to support: creation theories ranging from Hindu mythology to modern physics. One dance surely couldn't make sense of all that. And yet on stage, the first 20 minutes of Kaash (the Hindu word for if) turns out to be almost as good as collaboration can get.
Kapoor's Rothko-like background is a dense black square painted on gauze that vibrates like a hungry hole, poised to suck in any passing matter and spew it out. Saturated lighting - crimson, pink and midnight blue - frames the square with the changing colours of a cosmic storm, and the whole thing seems to pulse in time with the ferocious rhythms of Sawhney's layered chanting and drums.
It is like watching the aftermath of the Big Bang, with Khan's choreography as the fallout. He and his four dancers occupy the stage like a collective force field, fracturing and reforming their tight little groupings, wheeling across the stage like sheet lightning. They are a complex equation of pure mass, pure speed, pure energy. But at the same time they are also making a thrilling commentary on the music: their limbs slice through the dense mathematics of the percussion and their flickering gestures decorate its surface.
When the ferocity subsides and the dancers are allowed to settle into meditative solos, there is the breathtaking feeling that we have entered a whole new atmosphere. But from that point the collaboration falls apart.
The breakdown is initiated by the weak middle section in Sawhney's score, which features a woman's voice posing gnomic questions about herself and her place in the universe. After the savage abstraction of the opening, words sound feeble and dull, and they give Khan no musical support.
Some wonderful moments follow, including one passage where music and light combine to make us feel we are being sucked into an alien spaceship. But for the rest of the piece, the three elements rarely climax at the same moment. One sure sign of weakness is the amount of time we spend watching Khan. At the beginning the total effects are so powerful that they contain his prodigious talent. Towards the end, it is his physical grandeur and his startling extremes of stillness and speed that carry the work. Khan doesn't mean Kaash to be a star vehicle, but that is what it becomes.
· Kaash is at the Warwick Arts Centre (024-7652 4524) tomorrow, then tours.
