Combined skills workshop 3- Akram Khan 20/09/21

Who is Akram Khan?

 Akram is an English dancer and choreographer born in England into a Bangladeshi family. He trained in classical kathak and contemporary dance. 

Historical

Kathak is one of the main genres of ancient Indian classical dance and is traditionally regarded to have originated from the travelling bards of North India referred as Kathakars or storytellers. The Kathakars communicate stories through rhythmic foot movements, hand gestures, facial expressions and eye work. 

Summary of lesson:

At the start of the lesson we watched videos of Akram Khan dancing and how he was influenced by and combined Kathak (a traditional Indian dance) into his work. We watched 'Zero degrees' and the opening scene was synced narration with him and Sidi Larbi telling a story to the audience with some mudras movements. Mudras is hand gestures from classical Kathak. They also added symbolic gestures, mime and pedestrian movements as if they are thinking about what to say next, so it looks more spontaneous rather than rehearsed. It was really impressive to watch because their voices and bodies were so in sync and yet they still looked as though they were telling the story for the first time to somebody. 

The picture below is my annotated sheet of this scene.

We then took inspiration from what we had watched and annotated and got into groups of 3 to create our own synced story-telling with madras and movement.  This is the story we used for our video narration, 'Dancing on the streets'. You can see how ive annotated the sheet while brainstorming ideas with my group for certain words we will do movement on and how we will add a variety of different tone to our sentences to make it seem less robotic as we are speaking. Like from the opening scene of Zero degrees, the way they talk is very casual and seems unrehearsed.  We spent time saying the first paragraph together, keeping at the same pace and tone was a struggle at first but we were gradually getting better at sounding as one. We then focused on the way we say certain words and phrases, as seen on this sheet. By the second video, our voices sounded as one and we were a lot more confident on what the words were. The first video we do not look confident at all and everything looks really forced and rigid. 

First version 

Polished and refined version

Differences between the videos:

• We are more in time with speaking.
• Our tone of voice is consistent throughout with each other. We sound like one voice.
• Our movement is more confidently expressed.
• We are closer together to make it look more effective to an audience. 
• We are in character. Shown through facial expressions, body language and tone.

After focussing on the start of the story, we then split up into 3 groups to combine arts. We had a group of actors that played the 'Uncle' in the story, a group of singers to create atmosphere and a group of dancers. i was put into the group of dancers and we had the stimulus of the next three paragraphs of the story we had already annotated. Being in the dancers group, we had to read the paragraph about Sita being delighted about finally having the money for her dress and going into the shop to buy it. We came up with some choreography to express and symbolise her dancing around in delightment with  her money and then walking into the shop by miming a door opening with our hands. Akram Khan has used blending of arms and hands in a close crowd of dancers in his works before, so we took this inspiration to create an illusion of  creating the dress at (00:40) We then had Emma become Sita as she hands the rest of us the money. The rest of the video was put together after the whole class, in our 3 groups, had practiced their part of this performance. 

The skills we explored here was combining the arts but by having different people do different disciplines. this is something I've never tried before. when i think of combining arts i think of musical theatre, acting, singing and dancing all at once. I've never thought of it as splitting up the cast to do those separate things. I think it worked really well and was impressive that we achieved this in 40 minutes.