✦ Origins ✦
Xenos premiered in 2018, commissioned as part of the United Kingdom's 14-18 NOW programme marking the centenary of the First World War. Akram Khan announced it publicly as his last full-length work performed as a solo dancer, closing a chapter of a performing career built substantially on his own kathak training. Composer Vincenzo Lamagna built a score that moves between live and electronic textures and orchestral material to underscore the piece.
Its subject is an unnamed "sepoy," one of more than a million colonial Indian soldiers who served in the British Indian Army during the First World War, a history that has occupied little space in Western commemoration of the war. The piece follows this soldier's descent from disciplined ritual and dance into fractured memory and trauma as the violence of the front overtakes him. Khan built the piece as a corrective of sorts, using the WWI centenary as an occasion to bring an overlooked colonial history into a UK arts programme largely focused on European experiences of the war, while also using the character's collapse to speak more broadly about the ways war strips away culture, ritual, and identity from the people who fight it.
Structure
The solo is staged on a raked, earth-covered stage strung with ropes and pulleys that evoke both a trench landscape and a collapsing set of certainties. Khan's choreography moves from grounded, rhythmic kathak footwork, danced with traditional ghungroo ankle bells, in the piece's opening sections, toward increasingly fragmented, physically collapsing contemporary movement as it progresses — a shift that tracks the soldier's disintegrating hold on ritual, discipline, and identity under the pressure of war. Design elements reinforce the same trajectory: the ropes and pulleys that frame the space are gradually pulled taut and repositioned across the piece, and the soldier's relationship to the stage's tilted, uneven ground grows steadily more precarious, so that the physical instability of the set becomes inseparable from the character's own unraveling.
Reception & Legacy
Xenos was widely praised as one of the most significant solo dance-theatre works of its decade, recognized in particular for foregrounding a largely forgotten colonial history within WWI commemoration. It toured extensively after its premiere and is frequently read as a summation of Khan's long-standing fusion of kathak vocabulary with contemporary dance-theatre, marking a deliberate turning point as he shifted his own performing focus away from solo work and toward directing and choreographing for others. Critics repeatedly returned to the physical demands of the role itself — a single performer sustaining both the disciplined precision of kathak and an increasingly fragmented, exhausted physicality across the piece's full length — as a fitting closing statement for a dancer whose reputation had been built substantially on his own solo and duet performing.
As a solo built from a single dancer's body carrying both a specific historical trauma and a personal farewell, Xenos offers a useful contrast with ensemble-scale treatments of comparable subject matter, such as Crystal Pite's refugee-crisis work Flight Pattern for the Royal Ballet — one dancer standing in for a collective history rather than dozens of bodies embodying it at once.
See Also
Read the full profile of choreographer Akram Khan.