Desh is done. It is time to say
goodbye.
For
me, that is. For Akram Khan and the Akram Khan Company, it has just been
birthed, after a long and eventful gestation. And it will – we all firmly believe, audience
and critics, programmers and producers – go on to grow and flourish and soar
for many years to come. It has a sense of timelessness, this piece.
But
the rest of the creative associates have returned to our own worlds; after
having inhabited this one across 14 months, 15 cities, 6 time zones, 3576
emails, 196 phone calls, hundreds of sketches and videos and compositions and
lighting simulations (and these, just the ones I sent/received and remember - there are doubtless hundreds more!). And for the writers, after thousands of words of
which not more than a hundred can actually be heard on stage: the rest, all the
stories, the narrative connections, the leitmotifs, have morphed alchemically
into animation, calligraphy, chants and music, and – most breathtakingly,
unforgettably of all – into movement. Akram’s movement, which has never been
less than spectacular, is absolutely riveting here.
It
is also time to say goodbye to a team of almost preternaturally gifted people,
the kind one does not come across everyday. Brilliance – a word very easily
bandied about today – is a rare enough quality but brilliance that is so
generous, so ready to be at the service of another artist’s aspiration is
something one meets seldom in life. And that people so hugely gifted and deeply sensitive to the main artist should all converge on one project – across
continents and languages and disciplines – still seems just a whisker away from
a miracle. That is the pretty cynical, battle-hardened producer in me
talking, used to seventeen different kinds of madness on collaborative
projects, me-the-producer disarmed this time – in this new role as writer – by the suppleness everyone shared.
Akram,
the fountainhead behind this intensely creative – and, finally, inevitably
personal – journey through time and place; through history, memory and
imagination; springboarding on desire and duty and doubt and transcending them
all, surpassing even our expectations with his mastery and virtuosity.
Tim Yip, who imagined a lush, phantasmagorical visual world where dream,
reality and recollections flow into each other like all the tributaries into
the Jamuna. And Irene Lu, his costume manager and assistant, who was there at
every step, ideating, coordinating, encouraging.
Michael Hulls, with lights that conjure up a glorious palette of thunderous skies and
sunlit rivers and winter haze… the ephemera that swathes so much of Bangladesh.
Jocelyn Pook, whose score, whose soundscape,
is the most inventive yet faithful testimony I have heard: to the strident,
energetic streets of Dhaka; to the ferocity of human desire for freedom; to the
longing for land and belonging; to the muted jostling of trees and waves in
Gopalgonj on a quiet evening.
Polar Bear. Polar Bear. Writing and rewriting and editing with Polar Bear – something
I will dwell on in delight and detail – was easily among the most blithe part
of Desh days for me. The crispness of
the Jui dialogues owes so much to the shared sense of fun found in those
marathon writing sessions, and to his amazing ear for poetry and balance.
Ruth Little, the dramaturge, she of the gentle wisdom and patience which saw us through the making of the piece, through all the whimsical notions and initial profusion of ideas into sifting and selecting the truest ones.
YeastCulture, the animators who brought The
Boy, the Bees and Bonbibi – my story woven through Akram’s imaginary niece’s
refusal to learn Bangla into a reworked legend of the Sundarbans – to glorious life, with verve and puckishness, which
completely resonates with my vision of Shonu, the little boy Akram embodies.
Farooq Chaudhry, Akram’s producer nonpareil, whose vision and courage and
determination are, in so many ways, the fuel behind Desh. There is so much I learnt from Farooq in the course of the
year; it was no less than a master class in – well, much more
than production and management – in artistic accompaniment.
Fabiana Piccioli, AKC’s technical director, who translated Tim’s and Akram’s ideas into
reality and put this whole complex, polyphonic world together on stage. And
continues to, night after night.
And
the others, sometimes less visible ones who matter so much, whose touch
often had a magic-wand effect that got critics and audience enthusing about such-and-such element.
Damien Jalet, who devised the painted head sequence with Akram. Each time I see that,
I see Damien’s extraordinary capacity to take the simplest of elements and
create strangeness and otherness with it, to upend our habitual ways of perceiving
the dancing body. Each time I see that, I am also amazed by Akram’s capacity to
seize the kernel of the idea and build from it, weave the narrative into it, so the body is the story.
Leesa Gazi, actress and activist, who came in to record some of the early tales and
stayed on to vindicate our choices to highlight a very political, vocal
Bangladesh, one that fought and keeps fighting against all the ills that plague
the land. Leesa also brought in her little daughter Shreya, whose voice is
heard as Akram’s imaginary niece Eeshita, who – as Akram says – really steals
the show!
Linda Kapetanea & Jozef Frucek
of Rootless Roots, who workshopped with Akram, especially on The Boy, the Bees and Bonbibi sequence:
Akram’s and Linda’s improvisation (especially the riffs on David and Lady Gaga)
added so much more life to the tale!
Zoë
Anderson and her actors came for two weeks to record the initial scenes we had written (clumsily, speedily) as prototypes to allow Akram to devise the
staging of the stories. Only tendrils of those stories are seen, and none
through voices, but the two weeks were invaluable in gauging when and how
speech worked with dance.
Sander
Loonen, who had the sets built and the handled the videos and was unfailingly
cheerful and resourceful through our long, long days of early voice recordings.
Jose Agudo, Akram's rehearsal director and a very talented dancer.
Most
of the team at AKC, a superbly-oiled machine for logistic organisation, especially JiaXuan Hon, who singlehandedly tour-managed our whirlwind trip to
Bangladesh, and managed to get us all the appointments we (okay, mea culpa, I)
kept clamouring for at the eleventh hour. And Marek Pomocki who set up the Desh cloud and suddenly made sharing
unwieldy video and music files and thousands of photographs as easy as hello.
And many more souls.
And many more souls.
It
sounds like a bit of a variation on “It takes a village to raise a child” but
the truism does really hold true here. It took a bit of a global village, lots
of heart and lots of conviction, beyond all the material resources and talent, and I delight in having encountered it at such close quarters.
So goodbye will perforce be accompanied
by lots of vignettes. Ruth told us – at the beginning of this journey - about an anecdote she'd heard from
director Anne Bogart, of a nomadic desert poet in Senegal who had described the
poet as the one who remembers where the water holes are.
This, then, is what I am going to be doing over the next few posts. Charting out the
water holes of Desh. At least, the
moments that linger on for me, full of water — and honey.
