Hi dance friends. I’m Margaret Fuhrer, editor and producer of The Dance Edit newsletter and podcast, and I’m here this week with such a wonderful interview episode for you all, our latest episode in partnership with The Kennedy Center.

Our guests are the world-renowned choreographers and performers Akram Khan and Malavika Sarukkai. Both Akram and Malavika have roots in classical Indian dance traditions, Malavika in bharatanatyam and Akram primarily in kathak. And both make art that considers how to bring what is inherited into the present—how the classical can speak to the contemporary, and vice versa.

Malavika is actually coming to The Kennedy Center quite soon; she will perform her work River Sutra as part of its RiverRun Festival next week. Akram’s company is currently touring his production Jungle Book reimagined, which will be at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre April 4th to 15th.

I felt very lucky to be able to get these two celebrated and extremely busy artists on a Zoom call—a global Zoom call, with Akram in London and Malavika in India. Initially this was going to be a moderated conversation, with me in the middle asking questions. But by about two minutes in it became clear that I was superfluous, that the two of them had such a beautiful rapport that they’d be better off without me. So this is pretty much the last you’ll hear of my voice until the end of the episode.

Just a little context first: Our session together began with me asking them how they got to know each other. That was, it turned out, the only prompt they needed. And then I also wanted to mention that Malavika recently met both Akram and his mother in person; you’ll hear that come up early in the conversation.

Here they are.

[pause]

Akram Khan:

I’ve heard of Malavika’s name for years before I met her. A kind of living legend really. And also not in a kind of typical superficial way, but in a profound way. And she’s a superstar of bharatanatyam, whether we like it or… There’s no other word to describe it. She was performing in the very venues that I would go and want to be part of, in the venues in Europe. And so there was this extraordinary following of her work that I came across many fans and people within the industry who spoke so much about her. But I discovered her unfortunately quite late in my career. So sometimes when that happens, it feels like, oh, when you see the person, the experience is not as good as what was said. And actually it was the opposite of what happened. I was like, “Oh, they underplayed it all this time.”

When you actually experience it… I saw a piece that she did about River Ganges and I… It’s just very rarely where, very rarely—Pina [Bausch] is one of them, Peter Brook is another, Ariane Mushkin is another artist, Malavika is another—where you experience a show and you don’t know… You don’t have the words. So people would ask me after the South Bank—it was at South Bank—and they were asking me, “How did you feel? What did you experience?” And it was very hard for me to put it into words, because it hits you in the guts. It’s very experiential. Dance is very profound work. It doesn’t go to the head necessarily. It’s not devised to go to the head. It goes deep into your body. And that’s what I felt when I experienced the work for the first time.

Malavika Sarukkai:

Akram, I think you’ve been far too kind and far too gracious and generous in the way you’ve expressed yourself. But thank you for responding and letting me know what you think, because I think for an artist to an artist… And I think that’s what happened when I met you in India this time last year, November. Somehow I had the feeling that when I met Akram—I’ve seen him rarely on stage because in India… I mean I live here and we don’t get so many of your productions in this part of the world. But I just felt that there was an instant connect, and it was sort of so strange. I couldn’t quite figure it out. And I felt I knew Akram even from before. Though it was really the first time we were sitting and talking a little bit about dance.

So I think there was a kind of direct connect to the artist, to the person. And two, I think what I felt was the experience of what dance is for. Though we didn’t speak about it, but I felt it. I felt it. And that was very moving, because then it’s like, oh my God, I have known him for so long. I haven’t met him in person that many times. I haven’t seen so much of his work. I’ve seen some part of his work. But I think dancers, I think artists are speaking another language. Like he said, it’s of the heart and it’s really not much the mind. The mind can come in later, but mind is not the focus. And I think this what he also said about experiential. And I think that is dance. We all have these different forms. I mean, the contemporary, with the classical language, et cetera. But that’s only the exterior, that’s only the language on top. Actually, it’s energy, it’s life breath, it’s emotion.

And seeing him, and I think his mother as well—and I can’t but stop to speak of her. Again, I felt I knew her. I don’t know. I don’t know, Akram, what happened. But I just felt there was something… There was an immediate sort of… I don’t know, affection, fondness, but respect. And I think it was her love for dance. And that was so important, because I was very close to my mother and I lost her 10 years ago. And then I found this person, his mother, who had this abundant graciousness and love for dance. And I think I haven’t met so many people like that.

But obviously, Akram, coming back to his dance, he’s a name, he’s a superstar. I don’t know what else we call you, Akram. We call you many things. But it’s fascinating and rewarding to see what he has done, from where he started and what he has made of his dance and his language that he speaks. It’s another world. And I’m really… I was so happy to have met him in person, and spoken and danced. It was fabulous.

Akram Khan:

Thank you.

Malavika Sarukkai:

I think if it wasn’t for my mother, I might not have danced. It wasn’t my calling, it was her calling. And I was very, very young. I was very small, little, and I didn’t know. But somehow she took me and she put me in dance school, and started. I started training, but when I was 16, I realized that dance was my life. By the time I had made this decision—I don’t know how, but I think what propelled me towards finding dance was because in the world I saw around me when I was 14, 15, it was troubled. It was very uneven. And dance was the kind of sanctuary I went into. It was my space, it was my little paradise. It was where adults didn’t come in, which is my magical world. And so I sort of went into dance in that way.

And at 16 I decided I wanted to dance. But my mother was the supporter, she was the pillar in my life. She didn’t teach me dance, but she did almost everything else. She was my creative collaborator. She was my spiritual guide. She was my critic. She was the person I could talk to, I could invite into my rehearsals. She managed my dance, my schedules, she traveled with me, she did my lights. I mean, it was just impossible. She did everything. And she was also my mother. So I had this phenomenal person with a fierce spirit and devotion to dance. And dance was primary, I came second. I happened to dance, but dance for her was her life. And I think that was an amazing relationship we shared. So without her, I don’t know, no dance. But with her so much happened.

Akram Khan:

And when you were young, was she your teacher, dance teacher?

Malavika Sarukkai:

No.

Akram Khan:

No. Okay.

Malavika Sarukkai:

But she came to all my dance lessons and she took my practice.

Akram Khan:

Oh, wow.

Malavika Sarukkai:

Yeah, she was very particular. She didn’t bother whether I studied or not, she was not interested in academic pursuit at all. But she was interested whether I danced, whether I practiced. So yeah, she was a different kind of mother. And yours, Akram, how was that for you?

Akram Khan:

I think in many ways, a little bit similar. I would say there is a real sense of… When no one believed, she believed. And I think that belief is a pressure, and that pressure is a privilege to have. People misunderstand pressure, sometimes. When somebody imposes pressure on you or gives you pressure, it is because they see something in you. They believe in something in you more than you can see it, because you’re not ready to see it. And my mother was a literature expert, so I grew up as a child… Because my grandfather was a genius mathematician, and he was two times gold medalist of India. So being a woman, being the daughter of this male kind of legend, the society really shunned her and said, “Well, she’s not going to be academic or mathematics genius.” And funny enough, she had seven brothers, but none of the seven were mathematical. Nobody was a mathematical genius. But out of, not revenge, but out of a kind of defiance, she said, “I don’t want to do maths. I don’t want to be compared all my life to my father. I love stories.” And that’s how she got into dance.

And so as a child, she used to tell me every night, Greek mythology, Hindu mythology… from Hindu mythology, from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Chinese mythology, African mythology. She just collected, like a hunter gatherer. And then every night she would share it.

But the problem came later when I was a teenager and a late teenager and I was going to university. And then I started to get into arguments with so many people. And it was a very frustrating time at university for me, because the version I had of all the mythologies, and all the stories were different to their version, because the story of Adam and Eve was told by my mother through the lens of Eve. The story of Muhammad was told through the lens of Umm Habibah, or Juwayriya—the story of Prophet Muhammad was told through the story of the wives. The story of Jesus was told through the lens of Mary Magdalene. So the version was, and experience was, completely different. So I grew up with only female lens.

Still today she hasn’t told me why she did that. Was there a strategy? Was there… But she did say to me that if you love something, you will constantly question it. And you constantly see different facets of it. Because the moment you take it for granted, the moment you accept it, you don’t love it anymore. You feel you are above it. Never do that. Constantly question it, because that means you are still learning from it. So she was very instrumental in literature, I would say, to me. I wish she would follow me, but she was a school teacher, so she stayed mostly in London and I would go and travel and perform.

Malavika Sarukkai:

You know what? I think there’s an interesting similarity, because my mother was also interested in philosophy and literature and poetry. So that was also something. I grew up in an environment which there were… These kind of conversations were happening anywhere—at the dining table, in my dance practice, sometime when we are going out, even if you’re doing mundane things, like just at an office waiting for a passport—we found we were talking about these other dimensions to dance. And when I hear you, when you said your mother tells stories, my mother too always shared what she had read. If there was something interesting, whether I understood it or not, she would at least tell me about.

So, I think sometime, somewhere it kind of filtered in. And I think… It’s also about, I think, temperament of what you allow in and what you kind of observe from the world, what you actually take inside. And I think this was important. And very, very critical to dance wa,s she said, “It’s not a form of entertainment, it is a creative expression of the self.” And that I heard when I was very little and it grew with me. And I think it hugely influenced the way I would later create work or the concepts I choose. And yeah, it really shifted things for me. I think we were just lucky to have mothers like this, just to have them around and be influenced by them.

Akram Khan:

Absolutely. I mean, there was one thing I was going to mention was, the reason I mentioned your name with Pina’s, Pina Bausch’s name, and Ariane Mushkin and Peter Brook—the reason I remember those is not just experiential, but because something changed in me. And my mother told me, that’s what art can do. Profound art, deep art, it can change people. And I always say, change happens in four different seasons. The first one is, people change when they hurt enough that they have to. Secondly, people change when they see enough that they’re inspired to. Thirdly, people change when they learn enough that they want to. And the fourth one is, people change when they receive enough that they are able to.

So in dance… Dancing, you feel that you’re in the process of change. Something is changing every day. And perhaps for a moment if it connects with one audience, it’ll also change them profoundly. So yes, it’s not entertainment for sure. I completely agree, that it’s—not that entertainment is bad. I learned so much from popular culture, and I think the intention is slightly different or quite different. That’s all. I think people misunderstand when artists like yourself or myself or when we say that we are interested in art and profound immersion of work. It doesn’t mean that Charlie Chaplin is not profound, it’s just that he’s in a medium and an area which is much more popular, let’s say. Much more accessible.

Malavika Sarukkai:

But sorry to interrupt, but Charlie Chaplin is so profound.

Akram Khan:

Yes, exactly.

Malavika Sarukkai:

He’s extraordinary. I mean, the stylization he brings into that work. I mean, that’s what really… It just takes it beyond what it is.

Akram Khan:

Absolutely.

Malavika Sarukkai:

And to bring the tragic in laughter. I mean, to just be able to manage those two.

Akram Khan:

Yeah. Juxtaposition. Yeah.

Malavika Sarukkai:

I mean, it’s extraordinary. I think when I say entertainment, I think I should clarify it because coming from the repertoire that we inherited, which was primarily court repertoire, which you say two, 300 years old. The traditional bharatanatyam repertoire that we all… That I as a dancer inherited, and the way it is seen and presented these days, there is a certain sense of status quo. There’s a certain sense of, “Let’s keep it this way, this works.” There’s a certain sense of saying, “It works in the patriarchal world. Male poets wrote love songs. Women dancers danced it. They danced it in the courts of kings.” It was all wonderful. It all said—it made sense at that point in time. And I think for me it has been about questioning tradition, questioning this very repertoire, and saying, “Am I looking at it as tradition or change or tradition and change?” And I’ve always seen it as tradition and change.

Akram Khan:

Oh, beautiful.

Malavika Sarukkai:

Yeah. And many years ago it was… I think I must have been in my twenties or so, when looking and practicing it for about 10, 20 years, I started feeling uncomfortable, restless in this place I was put. And the expectations of my dance. And then it became that dance—bharatanatyam, this language—is not a style, it’s a language. And why are we confining it to being a style? So, I’ve been a bit of an outlier, I think. Pushing, extending. Extending because I love the form, I love the classical structure, the grammar, the stories.

And I think that’s where I’m coming in when I say entertainment, because we are allowing dance… and I think for me, it’s difficult to expect so little of dance. I can’t. I demand much more of myself through dance. And when I demand I say, “Oh my god. So what am I going to do? What do I create? How do I create? What else do I say? Do I stay with love songs only because that was what I inherited? Or can I move on?” It’s a seeking, because I love the classical so much. And when I say classical, I mean the certain vocabulary, movement vocabulary, et cetera, that we’re using. Gesture, language, et cetera. I respect it. So I need to question it.

Akram Khan:

It’s really interesting because, Malavika, being born and brought up in the west, at the time I didn’t quite realize, being a teenager, but as I grew up into my… I would say, pretty late in my early forties, that’s when I started to look back and realize that a shift had happened. And it’s a hard thing to talk about, about how in the industry that we’re in, the global industry, there was a shift, I think, in the early two thousands. And it continued to shift, where all classical forms, like Indian classical dance and African dance, they were sidelined. And what was put in front was the notion and concept of abstract or contemporary dance. And I felt it was happening, but I didn’t quite… My brain took time to catch up and to make sense of what was happening.

And Mavin, of course, is my younger brother and a devotee of you and a beautiful bharatanatyam artist. And he was in the classical world. And I was in the contemporary world. And it’s interesting because in the western industry, he struggled a lot that time, simply because he was really immersed in the classical form, and because I was interested in the contemporary form. But the classical was very personal to me. So, I only trained every morning in classical. So that was my starting point. And I still have to train every morning. But that was my grounding. That was my anchor. But because I happened to just swim in the contemporary world, I could see that there was really… Looking at Mavin, there was a really pushing away of him and making him feel that the classical form is irrelevant. And this disturbed me, hugely. So I started asking questions. Who are the ones who are the gatekeepers of the industry? Who are the observers? Who are the ones that are watching? Who are the ones that are going to come in to watch the performance?

And I started to realize there was a kind of… It’s so subtle, but also it’s very clear. There was a kind of colonial approach to the industry, a sense of colonization. How do we do it? We take away all your stories and we just abstract it so it could entertain us. We could call it contemporary. And thank god Pina Bausch was around, an artist like that, where… Or Trisha Brown, who made really interesting work, deep work. Otherwise, I would’ve completely dislodged myself from the contemporary dance world, because it felt like a place which was an experimental space, but without soul.

The shift of trying to take away the stories and the colors and the emotions from Indian classical dance and say, “Well look, just give me the form. We’ll present it to our audience so that we can understand it.” So I was wondering, who are the “we”? And predominantly it was for the white people, because they didn’t want to feel stupid, because they didn’t understand the nuance and the stories. And that was very problematic for me, later. I started to realize there was a real sense of something racial happening here, something colonial happening here within the contemporary industry.

I’m sure there’ll be backlash when I say these things, but it’s because I’m in the contemporary dance world I feel I can say that. The value of classical Indian dance, the value of traditional forms like African, it’s so important. And I think we see… I think, there was a difference in how we saw time. In contemporary, we only look to the future, and I think this is a generational thing that’s happening more and more. My children or my children’s generation don’t want to look to the past. They think everything in the past is wrong.

Indian classical tradition, in African tradition, time… There is no past and there is no future. There is no present. It is a deep, long, ocean time. And with contemporary dances, everything behind me is gone. So, I’m not interested. But I always say, in order to understand where you are going, you have to understand where you came from.

Malavika Sarukkai:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Akram Khan:

How do you feel in the industry, if you don’t mind me asking?

Malavika Sarukkai:

I think you’ve made such important like observations, which comes through your experience of having performed, and to various audiences, and globally. I think this idea of the colonial kind of mindset which chooses to see something and puts away some part of it. I think, actually, to live the cause with classical dance—I think any serious artist practicing classical, a classical form, from whichever part of India they come, or Africa, anything which is more profound, which has another depth to it, yes? Is, you feel, actually, all your life you are trying to swim upstream. There is so much resistance, and resistance against reaching out. And I think it’s easy—and I think another point is, I think people prefer to be conditioned to think less generally, than to feel. Now in an art form of profound any, in whichever way, is it contemporary or classical, whatever—if dance is profound, if that is an expression of dance, it demands that you feel. You have to give more of yourself. The artist has to give much more of herself, himself, but the audience also has to give of themselves. They have to be vulnerable.

Now if we don’t want that, right? I’m just thinking aloud—it’s almost like we are masked. That we allow—we say, “You know what? We are conditioned, we like to accept only this part. So don’t give us any more. This is fine.” You remain in that part. And so actually, dance is such a marathon, as you would agree with me. And with classical dance, it’s a fierce battle to stay the ground, to just hold on and say, “You know what? This matters to me and this is what I’m going to express and this is my language. So don’t mess with me. Expect me to do what you want to see. Because guess what, I am immersed in dance. I live it. I live a life in dance and this is what I want to dance.”

So I think in the industry, as you said, it’s really difficult for classical dance to sort of retain its flavor and to retain soul. To dance with soul is like you have to give of yourself. You’ve got to understand immersion every day of your life. It’s not immersion in, oh, this performance I’ll immerse, then I will go out. No. You’re drowned in it. It’s a passion. You have to live it with that fire, and you need something deep inside you. I think as individual artists you need that something deep inside which holds you, which stabilizes you against all these storms and all these kinds of things you are expected, not expected, to say, “You know what? This is my compass, this is my root.”

And also one more thing, I’d just like to add that with classical, in working with a more traditional sort of structure, et cetera, we perform the same pieces over decades. We don’t just say, “Okay, this is done, five years of this, so we don’t do it.” And then it requires even more, like give to it, to say, “How do I live the moment when I’ve danced it so many times, so many hours? What is it that I find within me to give? Can I surrender to the dance?” I mean, it becomes almost like it is asking so many questions of the individual and the intimacy of that conversation.

Akram Khan:

Yeah. The words that you’re saying though, intimacy, surrender, immersion. I think there is… Because I’m traveling so much, meeting young people, I feel there is a real shift in how they approach and their relationship to dance. Mavin and I were going through a series of auditions. It was really interesting, some of the questions that came up. The question is, “What time does your day finish?” Or, “Do you also work on Saturdays?” So I thought, Wow, the entry point into their relationship to dance is a job. It’s a job. And in the past the question would be, “Why don’t you work on a Sunday?” And that entry point is very clear, that it’s different to the entry point of another dancer who asks, “What are my hours?” All the words that you used, immersion, surrender, obsession—these are kind of dirty words now.

Malavika Sarukkai:

I feel, Akram, just hearing you—and I think it’s perhaps, you hear these questions because you have the company and you’re auditioning and you have these big productions happening. But somewhere I feel that overall the world has become much more transactional. Much more transactional. I mean that’s the world we live in. And then when you think of dance, you say, “Oh my god, that’s why you need dance even more.” Because you are living in a world which is so transactional, you need to go and give yourself up, unmask yourself and give yourself up to dance or to life.

I’ve always felt that wonderment is a word we are losing. And I think dance, in its deepest form, takes us to that moment of vastness. Of vastness! It’s like seeing the night sky. I mean, it is like knowing that you are a little speck in this universe—and that’s the celebration, to know you’re a speck, and actually you have the universe in front of you. I think wonderment as an emotion is something we don’t allow in our lives, perhaps because we think more now. We’re all used to thinking. And I say, “Can we just feel? Can we feel?”

Akram Khan:

We were talking about this in India, Malavika. We were talking about, where does Indian classical dance fit in the industry? And I kept using the phrase, it’s now become an endangered species. And so it’s even more important to have artists like Malavika to constantly remind this young generation the power of dance.

Malavika Sarukkai:

I saw this little thing, a little writing on a tree up in the mountain somewhere, which said, “This was once a seed that held its ground.” And what you saw was this huge, beautiful, magnificent tree. And I think back to that and say, “oh my God. We need to hold our ground. We need to be rooted. We need to have that identity. We need to say, “Who are we really? What do we dance? Why do we dance what we dance?” Profound art and profound dance, it is contemporary because it lives in the moment. If it lives in the moment, you can’t call it past. It’s now, it’s here, it’s with us, it’s this. And I think that’s what one is trying to share with people.

This has been fantastic. I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you. I’m so grateful. It’s been wonderful.

Akram Khan:

Thank you, Malavika. Thank you so much.

Malavika Sarukkai:

Thank you.

[pause]

Margaret Fuhrer:

A big thank-you to Akram and Malavika for their generosity with their time and insights. In the show notes, we have links with more information about Malavika’s upcoming performances at The Kennedy Center, and about Akram Khan Company’s upcoming performances of Jungle Book reimagined at Sadler’s Wells. Please be sure check those out.

And thanks as always to all of you for listening. We’ll be back next week with a headline rundown episode, discussing the dance world’s recent news stories. Until then, keep learning, keep advocating, and keep dancing.