✦ Who He Is ✦
Akram Khan began training in kathak, the classical North Indian dance form built around intricate footwork, spins, and storytelling gesture, at the age of seven, and performed professionally in productions including Peter Brook's staging of the Mahabharata as a child. He later studied contemporary dance at De Montfort University and the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, and founded Akram Khan Company in London in 2000 to pursue work that sat between those two traditions rather than choosing one. He choreographed a widely watched segment of the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, bringing his hybrid vocabulary to one of the largest audiences any contemporary choreographer has reached.
Khan's work is distinguished by the survival of kathak's rhythmic precision and narrative directness inside an otherwise contemporary, often collaborative physical language. He has built major duets with choreographers from very different traditions, including Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and flamenco dancer Israel Galván, and in 2016 choreographed and danced in a full-length Giselle for English National Ballet, reworking the Romantic-era classic through a contemporary, socially charged lens.
Signature Works
Zero Degrees (2005)
A duet created and performed with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, built around a real border-crossing story and staged with sculptor Antony Gormley's mannequin figures as silent third presences. Read the full profile →
DESH (2011)
A solo work exploring Khan's relationship to his father and to Bangladesh, mixing spoken storytelling, animation, and physically punishing solo dance; it won the Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production.
Xenos (2018)
Khan's announced final full-length work as a performer, centered on a colonial Indian soldier in the First World War, fusing kathak rhythm with the disorientation and trauma of trench warfare. Read the full profile →
Giselle (2016)
A reimagining made for English National Ballet that relocates the Romantic ballet's story to a community of displaced garment workers, retaining pointe work while reworking its dramaturgy and movement vocabulary.
Until the Lions (2016)
A promenade, in-the-round staging drawn from the Mahabharata's story of Amba, performed on a circular wooden platform with the audience seated on all sides, exploring gender, revenge, and rebirth through a small cast of dancer-collaborators.
Style & Method
Khan choreographs from the body outward, treating kathak's spinning turns, stamped rhythmic footwork, and hand-gesture storytelling (mudra-like but distinct from Indian classical dance's codified systems) as raw material to be stretched, broken, and recombined rather than preserved intact. His works are frequently built in close collaboration with composers, visual artists, and writers, and tend to foreground migration, displacement, and inherited memory as recurring subjects, reflecting his own position between British and Bangladeshi cultural identity.
Legacy
Khan is one of the clearest examples of a choreographer whose work has widened what counts as "contemporary dance" in a European context, insisting that a non-Western classical form can sit at the center of that conversation rather than at its margins. His influence is visible in the growing number of companies, including major ballet institutions, willing to commission work built from non-balletic classical vocabularies.
His long-standing creative partnership with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, dating back to Zero Degrees, and his cross-genre commission for English National Ballet both reflect the same underlying conviction that runs through his career: that classical forms, Western or otherwise, gain rather than lose meaning when placed in genuine dialogue with one another.