✦ Origins ✦
zero degrees was created and originally performed in 2005 by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Akram Khan, two choreographers from very different training backgrounds — Cherkaoui rooted in Flemish contemporary and contact-based dance, Khan in kathak reshaped through contemporary practice — meeting as co-creators and equal performers. The piece grew in part from a story Khan has told of an old man, a stranger, found dead in his train carriage while crossing the border between India and Bangladesh, and the strange, bureaucratic problem of how officials classify a corpse crossing a national line. A score by composer Nitin Sawhney runs through the work, at times performed live.
At the center of the stage sit two life-cast mannequins, sculpted by artist Antony Gormley — one cast from Khan's body, one from Cherkaoui's — that both performers treat throughout as third presences: sometimes a corpse, sometimes a witness, sometimes an extension of either dancer's own identity. Both men also speak within the piece, weaving spoken storytelling directly into the choreography rather than keeping text and movement separate.
The two choreographers built the piece together over an extended collaborative process rather than one setting movement on the other, an approach that was itself unusual for two artists of their emerging stature working as equal co-authors rather than in a choreographer-and-dancer relationship. That structure of shared authorship became something of a template for later cross-disciplinary duets between contemporary choreographers from different training backgrounds.
Structure
The choreography is built around close, often identical unison movement between the two men, a doubling that reads as much as a meditation on shared and separate identity as a formal choreographic device. Spoken narration, including Khan's recounted border-crossing story, is interwoven with contact-based partnering rather than set apart from it. Throughout, the two Gormley figures are lifted, carried, and repositioned between the two dancers, standing in turn for a body being transported, a marker of belonging and exclusion, and a plain reminder of mortality sitting at the edge of the stage. Sawhney's score moves between electronic textures, traditional instrumentation, and passages of spoken word, giving the two performers a shifting sonic landscape to work against rather than a single fixed rhythm, and reinforcing the piece's larger interest in crossing between different cultural and musical vocabularies rather than settling into one.
Reception & Legacy
zero degrees was received as a striking meeting point between two major contemporary voices working from distinct movement traditions, and it toured widely and internationally in the years following its premiere. It is frequently discussed in writing on contemporary dance addressing migration, national identity, and mortality, and is credited with raising both choreographers' international profiles in the years before each went on to build major solo choreographic careers of their own. The work is now often taught and written about as an early landmark in a broader movement of contemporary dance made explicitly from cross-cultural collaboration, in which two distinct physical vocabularies remain visibly different from one another rather than being blended into a single, homogenized style.
Coming several years before either choreographer took on the institutional roles they would each later hold — Cherkaoui at the Royal Ballet of Flanders, Khan as a widely commissioned solo voice — zero degrees captures both artists near the start of their international careers, working entirely on their own terms.
See Also
Read the full profiles of choreographers Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Akram Khan.