schrit_tmacher justdance! Festival | NL

THIKRA – Night to Remember

Akram Khan bids farewell to his own company — and he does so anything but quietly.

Seen by Klaus Dilger

Thikra: Night of Remembering, the final work Akram Khan has created for his Akram Khan Company, wants to be everything one last time: ritual, mythic space, invocation of women, lament for the dead, rebirth, trance state. That is a great deal — perhaps too much. But it is also precisely the kind of aesthetics of overwhelm that Khan commands like almost no one else: movement not as sequence, but as an apparatus of invocation.

The very first impression is unequivocal. This stage does not wish to be a place, but a primordial space. Rock, smoke, red light, cave, embers — an imagined before from which bodies emerge, as though they were rising not from the wings but from geological strata. Together with the Saudi Arabian artist Manal AlDowayan, with whom the piece was originally developed as a site-specific work for Wadi AlFann in AlUla, Khan has transferred to the stage a space that resembles a collective subconscious: half desert, half burial chamber, half repository of memory.

THIKRA_Akram-Khan©TANZweb.org

Into this space enters a female ensemble that is not introduced so much as unleashed. Twelve dancers hurl themselves into movement as though it were not expression but necessity. They stamp, drag, slice, crawl, lash their hair through the air, arrange themselves into fronts, circles, blocks, waves. Everything in this piece is calibrated for intensity. There is scarcely any slack, hardly any hesitation, almost no psychological in-between space. Khan is not interested here in differentiation but in compression. He is not concerned with characters, but with states of being.

That can be magnificent — and at times also rather wearing. For Thikra is an evening that places its images before us with immense seriousness and seems to believe wholeheartedly that their force alone will suffice. Sometimes it does. When the bodies, in synchronous formations, appear to be shifted by some inner tectonic force, when suddenly from within the group a resistance, a disturbance, a gesture of refusal flares up, the work unfolds an almost magnetic power. In those moments, one does indeed witness something that exceeds choreography: a social body, a memory in the plural, a collective that does not merely perform community decoratively, but exists as such in physical terms.

“Thikra” means remembrance, and Khan is clearly interested in what inscribes itself into bodies: violence, ritual, origin, transmission, perhaps trauma too. Yet rather than examining these inscriptions more closely, the piece often circles around them in symbolically charged tableaux. This is suggestive, but not always precise.

THIKRA_Akram-Khan©TANZweb.org

Thikra does not wish to be a discursive work, nor an analysis of femininity, origin or ritual. It operates in the mode of invocation. Anyone looking here for narrative clarity or semantic coherence will quickly grow impatient. Much remains associative, some of it wilfully opaque. A matriarch appears like a vision from the embers. At the beginning, a figure dressed in white lies on a stone downstage, as though prepared for sacrifice. Groups form processions, confrontations, mourning rites, scenes of awakening. All of this has force, though not always direction.

That is precisely where the fault line of the evening runs. If one surrenders to it, it functions as an atmospheric vortex. If one looks more closely, it begins in places to fray. Not every image is as strong as it presents itself to be. Not every repetition deepens what has come before. Some passages rely too heavily on the effect of solemnity, volume and symbolism. Then the piece becomes weighty without ever truly becoming profound.

And yet it would be wrong to reduce Thikra to its excess. For Khan is still capable of something that has become rare in contemporary dance: he can build large-scale form without losing the body. His choreography always remains physically conceived, never merely illustrative. Movement is not the vehicle of an idea, but a form of knowledge in itself. The true quality of the evening lies precisely in the transitions between movement languages. Bharatanatyam and Kathak are clearly present as rhythmic and gestural reservoirs, but they are not exhibited as such; rather, they are translated into a contemporary bodily logic. Khan does not work with cultural quotations, but with kinetic intelligences. That is the difference between surface and composition.

This becomes particularly visible in the use of hair. What elsewhere might quickly resemble a symbolic image or a rather predictable “strong women” aesthetic becomes here genuinely choreographically productive. Hair is not ornament, but material: resistance, weight, extension, pull, hindrance, weapon. When it is flung, pulled, hooked, bound, it generates not only powerful images but new movement relations. For brief moments, the body itself shifts — its balance, its lines, its possibilities.

Musically, the evening leaves no doubt as to what it wants: impact. The composition by Aditya Prakash, complemented by the sound design of Gareth Fry, works with tribal pulse, choral layering and a permanent forward pressure. It is not subtle, but it is effective. The music does not open up the space — it compresses it. It drives the piece into an almost continuous emotional high tension that occasionally becomes exhausting, but never arbitrary.

Perhaps Thikra: Night of Remembering is not Akram Khan’s most concentrated work. That may also be due to the fact — as mentioned at the outset — that the piece was first conceived for a site-specific version in Wadi AlFann at AlUla, and that the stage version feels at times a little like the afterimage of that original context. Perhaps it is even a work that, to some extent, falters under the weight of its own symbolic ambition. But even where it wants too much, it remains interesting. Because it does not merely assert, but earnestly searches for a form in which memory, ritual and collective physicality might once again become tangible in bodily terms.

This farewell by the company perhaps has much in common with the content of Thikra, which the programme note summarises as follows:

“…This night is a moment of reflection on their shared past. Through remembering their history and a colonised past, the tribe finds space for healing, so that it may rise by surrendering to the ritual of life and death. In this reconnection lies liberation. And only then does the ancestral spirit return to rest — until the following year.”

And it is danced magnificently by: Laura Bufano, Ching-Ying Chien, Amrita Doshi, Kavya Ganesh, Shreya Kannan, Madoka Kariya, Azusa Seyama Prioville, Nikita Rao, Rohini Shetty, Elpida Skourou and Mei Fei Soo.