In 2002, the premiere of Kaash felt like a watershed in Akram Khan’s career, the moment when this prodigiously talented dancer revealed himself as a choreographer of stamina and reach. It wasn’t simply that Kaash was his first full-length work, but that by collaborating with artists such as Nitin Sawhney and Anish Kapoor, Khan found a way of pushing dance into new realms of metaphor and metaphysics.
If Kaash was a revelation then, it hasn’t lost its impact now. On paper its ambitions sound diffuse, exploring ideas of the universe that are yoked together from theoretical physics and Hindu theology, yet on stage it conjures a vast and confidently imagined cosmos. Kapoor’s backdrop is dominated by a fathomless dark square – a geometrical black hole around which changing colours pulsate to the tumultuous drumming and chanting of Sawhney’s score. Khan’s choreography, meanwhile, is a dance of destruction and creation. His five dancers ride the music in stamping, spinning, flickering lines, a thudding ensemble from which individuals continually splinter off into variations of their own, as if Khan were suggesting the infinity of possibilities within a single phrase.
The core of Khan’s vocabulary is here – the whiplash speeds and silken arms, the percussive richness of bare feet against the floor, but some of the material has been reworked to reflect the stylistic diversity of its new cast. Kaash is not a perfect piece, its gear changes between exhilarating intensity and slow meditation can feel forced. But these choreographic changes pay dividends in the long solo sections where, extending the metaphor of creation, the dancers evolve from abstract particles to vividly specific individuals: Sadé Alleyne hugging the floor in a sequence of folding, twisting, creaturely moves; Sung Hoon Kim, tall, sinuous and floating like a bird in space.
• At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 5 March. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
