During her long and incomparably pert career, Kylie Minogue has provoked some powerful responses in a wide variety of men, but it’s a safe bet that no other straight man has ever responded in quite the same way as the Anglo- Bangladeshi dancer and choreographer Akram Khan: “It was like looking into a mirror at my ideal self,” he says. “An image of what I would like to be. The kind of honest, humble human being that I just didn’t expect.”
Remarkably, he seemed to have just as profound an effect on her. They met this summer, when Khan was working with a different kind of diva, the imperious French ballerina Sylvie Guillem, on a show called Sacred Monsters. Khan, trained from the age of seven in the Indian kathak style of dance, and Guillem, who was even younger than that when she realised ballet would be her life, had both grown up immersed in rigorous classical traditions and wanted to explore their feelings of being liberated and, strangely, profaned as they broadened their horizons. “Kylie came to a rehearsal,” says Khan, “and afterwards we talked for hours. She was really moved.”
It was only a matter of months since Kylie’s doctors had told her she was cured of the breast cancer that had been diagnosed in 2005. “She told me about coming through that,” he recalls, “of how it felt like a second chance and made her want to do something more spiritual.” So, instead of the slow, therapeutic build-up she had planned to her new sold-out tour, the singer threw herself into two intense, gruelling weeks learning dance routines based on kathak. With its tornado-like spins and characteristic thunderstorms of stamping, kathak isn’t the obvious movement style for an elfin pop princess in spiky heels. Apparently, however, Kylie was determined to bring an Asian element to her show after a trip to Sri Lanka during her recuperation. “It wasn’t just the temples and professional dancers that inspired her,” Khan says. “She’d dance on the beach with local children, who had no idea who she was and would tell her off when she did it wrong.”
He has choreographed a “temple” section for the new Showgirl Homecoming tour, blending four songs — Finer Feelings, Confide in Me, Cowboy Style and Too Far — into a mini creation myth. “It was based on images of gods, and the idea of her being made by the gods out of four elements, but wanting to be separated from her creators: a human being, not a puppet.” Khan admits he found it funny teaching kathak to someone with such “tiny” feet. “But her arms and face are incredibly expressive. And you can see the appetite she has — for everything.” They rehearsed at Sadler’s Wells while a review called Brasil Brasileiro was playing there, and Khan remembers that when he gave her a break from rehearsals, he’d often find her, in an echo of her Sri Lanka experience, hanging around outside the studios, learning samba from the children in the company.
At the star’s insistence, Khan himself appears in the show, doing kathak in two video sequences that begin and end his section. He was reluctant at first, but finally realised what a calling card it would make. “Actually, not a calling card,” he corrects himself, unashamedly, “more a ‘wanting card’. I never perform to 10,000 people — how incredible that must be. And I want to keep putting myself in these situations, to be lost and wondering which planet I’m on. If you don’t have a clue what you’re doing, then you must be going in a new direction.”
Khan’s life has always involved navigating between contradictory worlds, although he hasn’t always found the process as exciting as he does now. Born in south London to a middle-class immigrant Bangladeshi family, he used to think of the front door of his house as a “star gate”, with Britain on one side and India on the other. As a hyperactive child, he used to fling himself about to western pop music, until his mother pointed him towards kathak at the age of seven. In many ways a rebel herself — she used to sneak to dance classes on her way home from school in Bangladesh so that her strict Islamic father never found out — Khan’s mother was also a traditionalist who insisted her son speak Bengali at home and study for a “respectable” profession.
As a teenager, inspired by stories about his mathematician grandfather and by the intricate rhythmic sequences of kathak, Khan entered his A Beautiful Mind phase. “I was young, and even more isolated than most teenagers because of the dance, so when I heard about my grandfather, I decided I must also be a genius. So I started codifying everything.
People became a string of numbers for me, depending on skin colour, eye colour, height and so on.” This was also, coincidentally, when he discovered Kylie. “I didn’t even like Neighbours, but I had a crush on her and always hurried home from school to watch.” And did he tell her when they met? “Of course not. I’m sure she gets that all the time — I didn’t want to look like another weirdo.”
He was rescued from these two equally unhealthy adolescent fixations by the theatre director Peter Brook, who cast him, at 14, as the Boy in his celebrated production of The Mahabharata. “Everything changed then,” says Khan. Becoming an accountant was no longer an option, but he did compromise with his parents’ ambitions to the extent of getting a degree — albeit in contemporary dance from De Montfort University.
Now 32, Khan moved out of the family home only last year: “Getting married (to a dancer, Shanell Winlock) was a clue it was time.” His roots are obviously deep and strong, but he seems to be moving ever further away from the kathak that used to be their natural expression. Last year, he collaborated with the Flemish-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and the sculptor Antony Gormley on Zero Degrees, a spare, limpid meditation on the body’s progress towards death. This year, he also worked for the first time with the minimalist composer Steve Reich. Next year gets even odder. He is creating a piece with the National Ballet of China and collaborating with Juliette Binoche on a two-handed play called Gnosis, loosely inspired by the same apocrypha as The Da Vinci Code.
“It’s based on the idea that the body contains all the knowledge you will ever need,” he says, “and the goal of your life is to find it. It looks as if I’m diversifying, but I think I started scattered, and now, in a funny way, I’m moving towards my beginning, becoming what I want to be.” So, in light of what he said earlier, does that mean he’s turning into Kylie Minogue? To Khan’s infinite credit, whether as an actor or as a human being, when he says “I hope so”, you don’t doubt him for a minute.q
