Differences between Matthew Bourne's and Akram Khan's approach to combining art forms and styles

Differences between Mathew Bourne`s and Akram Khan`s approach to combining art forms and styles:

Although they both mix and fuse different dance styles together to create their works, they use different styles from each other. Bourne tends to mix, ballet, contemporary and jazz. Whereas, Khan mixes contemporary with classical kathak. They have both been influenced to create this style of dance, but in different ways. Matthew was influenced by Frederik Ashton, a complex ballet choreographer and Akram was influenced by mudras (kathak hand movement) and storytelling (kathaker). 

A similarity between them would be what they include in their works. They both include pedestrian movements in their pieces, for example ‘Nutcracker’ (Matthew) and ‘Zero Degrees’ (Akram). Matthew incorporated pedestrian movement throughout Nutcracker but one of the main ways was through the morning routine scene, where the servants are getting the young prince ready for the day. They used many pedestrian movements such as brushing the teeth, washing him and dressing him. In Zero Degrees, the pedestrian movements were hand gestures in the opening scene when they are talking about the passport story. The difference between the pedestrian movements would be how over exaggerated they were in Nutcracker compared to how casual they looked in Zero Degrees. 

Both Akram and Matthew have styles of dance that are unique to themselves. Bourne’s work, ‘Dance theatre’ is special to him because it is story telling without words. For example, in Nutcracker, not of the characters had any spoken dialogue at any point during the show. The audience had to rely on facial expression, body language and mime and gestures to understand the story. He wants his dancers to not only have the best technical ability, but the ability to act and portray a story through dance and expression. Khan’s style is referred as contemporary kathak and is interesting because contemporary and kathak are two contrasting styles of dance that he has mixed. No other director/choreographer has been as successful as him when doing this.

The themes and context of their works are very different. Bourne’s story telling are based off existing classical ballet and operas. H e explores lots of themes in these stories that are relevant to everyone, so that all of his audience enjoy them. In Nutcracker, he explored themes of comedy, love, sadness, fairness, lust, sensuality, anger, power, innocence. Khan’s work is often based on personal or autobiographic experiences. For example, Zero Degrees, the opening scene, is his own story that he turned into choreography as well as speaking it directly to an audience. It isn’t complex choreography, mainly madras and pedestrian hand movements along with some mime. He doesn’t want to distract from story telling with big leaps and turns. 

Both Matthew and Akram create their choreography by collaborating with their dancers, instead of teaching them set choreography but they have different approaches. For example, in Nutcracker, the orphans created their dance with the toy from a small stimulus of hopscotch. Hopscotch is an outside game for children that includes hopping along on one foot, changing feet. This slowly developed into more complex choreography but came from something so simple and childlike, which is important because they are playing children and characterisation is important to Matthew. Khan started the creative process of Zero Degrees by getting him and his dancers to share random stories about their lives. This gave them motivation to start a movement about one of the stories, or for example, the first scene is his personal story, just said in complete sync. 

Matthew uses props in his works to enhance the storyline and allow the characters to dance with the props. For example, in Nutcracker, the orphan Clara dances with her first ever toy to show the audience how delighted and excited she is. She also holds it close to her and looks at it in ways that let the audience know that is very precious to her. However, Khan uses props in a symbolic way. The dummies at the end of Zero degrees that are left on the stage alone, represent the two dancers. 

Bourne uses dances from different cultures in his work, such as the liquorice all sorts in Nutcracker dancing in a flamenco style to communicate the arrogant and sassy quality of the character and sweet. As Bourne being a white British ale, he doesn’t explore or reference cultural themes in his work, but will use cultural dance styles for story telling and character telling. Khan fuses two dance styles, kathak and contemporary to create his unique style ‘Contemporary Kathak’. His work explores themes of cultural identity. As a British born, Asian man of Bangladeshi heritage, his work explores his own experience with cultural identity, even through cultural dance.

Bourne breaks and pushes boundaries when it comes to combining the arts disciplines, dance, music and acting. Even though he combines acting and dance, he does not include spoken words in his eclectic style. The performers are acting using nonverbal communications such as body language, gestures, movement and facial expression. An example of this would be in Nutcracker when the knicker bocker glory character is trying to persuade Clara to smoke his cigar, so he will give her his extra ticket to get into candy land. His body language and movement was very hypnotising and seductive, which came across as manipulative because Clara was giving into him. He was luring her in with the ticket and then gestured for her to smoke his cigar and when she refused by shaking her head, he left her alone and walked away with an annoyed facial expression. Khan breaks the boundaries of the artistic disciplines by having his dancers speak as themselves and not characters. Unlike Bourne, he includes spoken word in some of his works, like the train story in Zero Degrees. It was spoken in unison by the two dancers. He also includes live singing in some of his works, like at the end of Zero Degrees.

Music is a central element for both Bourne and Khans work and combined arts approach. Bourne uses pre-existing classical scores for full orchestra from the original ballet/opera he is basing his work around. Eg, Nutcracker and the original composer for the original ‘The Nutcracker’ Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Musicians are placed in the orchestra pit and hidden from the audience. Unlike Bourne, khan places his musicians on stage so they are as visible as the dancers. The musicians in zero degrees are at the back of the stage. The combinations of musicians and singers on stage is influenced from the relationship of musicians and dancers in classical kathak. 

Both Bourne and khan use story telling in their works. Bourne uses existing classical ballet, opera and films and khan uses personal stories to tell. However, Bourne’s combined arts pieces are told in chronological order. He works hard to make sure the audience can follow the story, as there is no spoken words in his pieces. This is why his work is so popular and accessible to everyone. However, Khans works are structured in a very contrasting way to Bourne’s. He uses a fragmented structure, not a linear narrative. Audiences must work hard to piece together the story through his scattered scenes. This leaves his pieces to be an audience members interpretation, everyone will leave with a different opinion on what the story was about and what they got from it. It’s a more contemporary style of storytelling.