Indian beat for last artistic segment at opening ceremony

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Akram Khan, a trained kathak dancer of Bangladeshi origin.

London-born Akram Khan, a trained kathak dancer of Bangladeshi origin, was one of the main collaborators for the opening ceremony of 2012 Olympics on Friday.

Thirty-eight-year-old Khan choreographed and presented the closing piece of the artistic part of Danny Boyle’s Isle of Wonder that came just before the athletes’ parade started on Friday.
The internationally-acclaimed dancer and choreographer learnt kathak from the age of seven from renowned kathak dancer and teacher Sri Pratap Pawar, who was the first disciple of kathak maestro Birju Maharaj. He then trained in contemporary dance at De Montfort University.
Khan, who first trained in the folk dance of Bangladesh, has also worked with Australian singer Kylie Minogue, French actress Juliette Binoche, British sculptor Antony Gormley and Indian-origin artist Anish Kapoor.
He uses elements of kathak, contemporary dance and Bangladeshi traditional folk dances to create new work.
Khan’s segment highlighted the struggle between life and death, between hope and defeat and was set to loud heartbeats, which were overshadowed later by Mahatma Gandhi’s favourite hymn, Abide With Me, sung live by Emeli Sandé.
Khan along with 50 dancers and nine-year-old Reiss Jeram, who is of Indian origin, presented a piece on “mortality,” to present the human reality and highlight the transfer of possibilities and hopes between generations.
Boyle approached Khan to work with him on the opening ceremony after watching a performance of his piece Vertical Road – which explores the themes similar to those explored in the opening ceremony.
“The only brief he gave me was mortality and I initially though he must be joking. How does the Olympics opening ceremony connect with a dance about mortality,” Khan said, adding that Boyle had offered him a choice between choreographing the whole ceremony or the last artistic segment. “I definitely wanted to do this piece,” he said.
Describing working with Boyle as “an exciting and humbling experience,” Khan said, “I have tried to reconnect our intimacy and creativity to this gigantic world, to all our roots and to our hopes for the future.”
In sport and art both, he said, “We desire to test the very limits of what we’re capable of doing. In sports, it is human endurance, and in arts human imagination,” Khan said.
“The underlying faster music, the hard, fast and rhythmic beat, which was made for the dancers and which the audience did not hear was based on the Indian mathematical patterns by the composer group, the Underworld,” Khan said.
Inspired by different philosophical thought systems, Khan, who is a Muslim, said one of his inspirations is the Hindu philosophy of the cycle of life and death. “This is what I presented in the piece, the dance between soul and memory, the dance between one generation and the other.”