Autumn Dates Announced at Sadler’s Wells for Akram Khan’s “Masterpiece” DESH
“DESH is as transporting a piece of dance as I have ever seen”
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The Telegraph
“…the most urgent, beautiful and confident work of his career”
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The Guardian
“DESH is a masterpiece, the best thing that he has ever done.”
The Observer
PERFORMANCE DATES: 2 – 9 October 2012, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Rosebery Avenue, London EC1R 4TN
PRESS NIGHT: 2 October
Production Images: http://bit.ly/my6dY0
Akram Khan’s smash-hit solo show DESH returns to Sadler’s Wells in October after receiving endless praise from critics, winning an Olivier Award and being nominated for a South Bank Sky Arts Award.
The run heralds the return of Akram Khan to the international dance stage in almost a year following an Achilles tendon injury in January, which postponed the production’s run at Sadler’s Wells in February 2012. The performance will follow Akram Khan’s collaboration with Danny Boyle for the Olympics Opening Ceremony in July – the most watched show on earth.
DESH, meaning 'homeland' in Bengali, is one of Khan’s most personal works to date. At once intimate and epic, DESH explores human fragility in the face of natural forces, confronts the power of our personal heritage and celebrates the resilience of the human spirit.
Moving between Britain and Bangladesh DESH creates a completely new environment on stage that symbolises and embodies the chaos, but also hope of Bangladesh and its people.
For DESH, Sadler’s Wells Associate Artist Khan has teamed up with a world-class assemblage of collaborators:
Oscar-winning visual artist Tim Yip (production designer for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)
Fellow Sadler’s Wells Associate Artist and lighting designer Michael Hulls
Writer and poet Karthika Nair
Olivier Award-winning composer Jocelyn Pook
Slam-poet PolarBear
Akram Khan says: “2012 has been a incredible year for Akram Khan Company with my Achilles tendon injury, involvement in the Olympics Opening Ceremony and now DESH returning to Sadler’s Wells in October. It was heartbreaking to cancel the Sadler’s Wells dates earlier in February this year and I am excited to perform there once again.
“The voice of this journey is Bengali, the first language and sounds I heard as a child. Bengali provokes thoughts of home, but despite being at my core, I cannot dream or think in Bengali, only in English. This duality of self, of origin and of lives lived is explored through DESH, together with the elements of earth and water that are central to Bangladeshi culture and the sad reality that Bangladesh is likely to be one of the first countries to perish under the rising sea levels caused by world environmental pollution: our disposable culture wiping away the country of my ancestors.”
DESH is sponsored by COLAS, and co-produced by MC2: Grenoble, Curve Theatre, Leicester, Sadler’s Wells London, Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg and Concertgebouw Brugge. The work has been produced during residencies at Curve Theatre, Leicester and MC2: Grenoble.
Akram Khan is an Associate Artist of MC2: Grenoble and Sadler’s Wells, London in a special international co-operation.
Akram Khan Company is supported by Arts Council England.
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Press information and images:
Jack Hickmott: jack.hickmott@kallaway.com
Nazneen Nawaz: nazneen.nawaz@kallaway.com
020 7221 7883
Press images: http://bit.ly/my6dY0
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Twitter: @akramkhanlive
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DESH International Tour Dates
2012
26 – 28 September, Teatro Argentina, Rome
2 – 9 October, Sadler's Wells Theatre, London
18 – 29 December, Théâtre de la Ville, Paris
About Akram Khan Company
Akram Khan Company was founded by Akram Khan and his producer Farooq Chaudhry in 2000. The company has established a worldwide reputation for work that is ambitious, powerful, fresh, relevant and profoundly moving. Few dance artists are able to reach out to audiences in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Australia and Asia to be understood and enjoyed by them in the way Khan is. A classicist and a modernist, the storytelling in Khan’s work has an uncanny ability to reflect our times and in the past ten years he has reinvigorated perceptions of dance, other art forms and cultures.
Khan has been the recipient of numerous awards throughout his career including the Laurence Olivier Award, the prestigious ISPA (International Society for the Performing Arts) Distinguished Artist Award, the South Bank Sky Arts Award and the UK Critics' Circle National Dance Award. Khan was awarded an MBE for services to dance in 2005. He is also an Honorary Graduate of Roehampton and De Montfort Universities, and an Honorary Fellow of Trinity Laban.
The company has also collaborated with some of the world’s best-known performers and artists including Danny Boyle, Kylie Minogue, Juliette Binoche, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Sylvie Guillem, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Nitin Sawhney.
DESH - artistic credits:
Direction, Choreography and Performance Akram Khan
Visual Design Tim Yip
Music Composition Jocelyn Pook
Lighting Design Michael Hulls
Stories imagined by Karthika Nair and Akram Khan
Written by Karthika Nair, PolarBear and Akram Khan
Dramaturge Ruth Little
Creative Acting Director Zoë Nathenson
Eshita’s Voice Sreya Andrisha Gazi
Jui’s Voice Eesha Desai
Visual Animation created by Yeast Culture
Set Construction Sander Loonen (Arp Theatre)
Sound Design Nicolas Faure
Costume Supervisor Kimie Nakano
Technical Director Fabiana Piccioli
Rehearsal Director Jose Agudo
Video Sander Loonen
Sound Engineer Marcus Hyde
Stage Manager Giles Metcalfe
Tour Manager Mashitah Omar
Producer Farooq Chaudhry
Akram Khan gratefully acknowledges the contribution of the following artists:
Damien Jalet (devised Painted Head Sequence with Akram Khan), Leesa Gazi (Culture Coordinator / Voice Artist), Steve Parr (music recording and mixing), Samuel Lefeuvre, Nicola Monaco, Andrei Nazarenko, Sebastien Ramirez, RootlessRoot (Linda Kapetanea & Jozef Frucek), Shantala Shivalingappa, Kate Braithwaite, Sue Buckmaster, Renee Castle, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Daniel Hart, Syed Shamsul Haq, Chris Janschke, Labik Kamal, Urmee Mazher, Bhasker Patel, Shamsur Rahman and the singers Sohini Alam, Natacha Atlas, Melanie Pappenheim, Jeremy Schonfield and Tanja Tzarovska.
Akram Khan is an Associate Artist of MC2: Grenoble and Sadler’s Wells, London in a special international co-operation.
Sponsored by COLAS
Co-produced by MC2: Grenoble, Curve Leicester, Sadler’s Wells London, Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, Concertgebouw Brugge
Produced during residencies at Curve, Leicester and MC2: Grenoble
Supported by Arts Council England
Akram Khan Company gratefully acknowledges the support of the Bangladesh High Commission, London.
Tim Yip
A renowned artist, Tim Yip has multidisciplinary works in costume design, visual and contemporary art. For his work in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Tim won the Oscar for Best Art Direction and Costume Design in 2000 and he won the British Academy Film Award for Best Costume Design in 2000. Tim graduated from Hong Kong Polytechnic with a degree in photography. Since working on his first film A Better Tomorrow directed by John Woo in 1986, he has accomplished costume designs and art direction for many film and theatrical performances over the past two decades. Tim has collaborated with film directors of international acclaim such as John Woo, Ang Lee, Tsai Ming Liang, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Li Shaohong, Stanley Kwan, Chen Guofu, Chen Kaigeand Feng Xiaogang to name just a few. Tim has also worked with many renowned Taiwan theatrical groups such as Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, Contemporary Legend Theatre, Han Tang Yue-fu Dance Ensemble, Tai-Gu Tales Dance Theatre, U Theatre, with performances that have toured all over the world. His striking costume design and art direction for the theatre production Medea, television drama Oranges Turn Ripe, feature films Temptation of a Monk and Double Vision have further attracted worldwide attention to his work. In earlier works, Tim introduced his concept of the “New Orientalism” aesthetic, making him an important artist in helping the world understand the beauty of Chinese Culture and arts. Since 2002, he has held many costume exhibitions such as Faces of the Time at the Taiwan National Palace Museum, Bourges Maison de la Culture in France and a special photography exhibition in Spain, conveying his interpretation of beauty in Oriental art to Western audiences. In 2004, Tim Yip was the art and costume director for the Beijing handover performance at the Olympic Games closing ceremony in Athens. In recent years, he has held various solo art exhibitions in New York, Beijing and Shanghai, and in 2005 he was invited by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to participate in the China Red exhibition. The Beijing Today Art Museum organized his solo art exhibition Illusions of Silence in late 2007. Tim has several publications including Lost in Time, Flower of the Wind, Floating, Circulation, Rouge: L’art de Tim Yip (published in both French and English), Illusions of Silence and Passage.
Jocelyn Pook
Best known for her score for Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Jocelyn Pook is an award-winning composer who writes music for film, television, theatre, dance and the concert platform. Jocelyn graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1983, where she studied the viola. She then embarked on a period of touring and recording - with artists such as Peter Gabriel, Laurie Anderson and PJ Harvey - both as a soloist and with The Jocelyn Pook Ensemble, performing repertoire from her albums and music from her film scores. For her music-theatre piece Speaking in Tunes she won a British Composer Award and, for the National Theatre's production of St Joan, she won an Olivier Award. Jocelyn has established an international reputation as a highly original composer of screen music following her score for Eyes Wide Shut, which won a Chicago Film Award and a Golden Globe nomination. Other film scores include: The Merchant of Venice (Dir: Michael Radford), Time Out (L'Emploi du Temps, Dir: Paul Marcus) and Brick Lane (Dir: Sarah Gavron). She also contributed a song to the soundtrack of Gangs of New York (Dir: Martin Scorsese).
Jocelyn has composed scores for television shows and commercials, and was nominated for a BAFTA for Channel 4's The Government Inspector (Dir: Peter Kosminsky). With a blossoming reputation as a composer of electro-acoustic works and music for the concert platform, Jocelyn continues to celebrate the diversity of the human voice. Her work Mobile was a commission from the BBC Proms and The King's Singers and is a collaboration with the Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. Portraits in Absentia was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and is a collage of sound, voice, music and words woven from the messages left on her answerphone. Ingerland, Jocelyn's first contemporary opera, was commissioned and produced by ROH2 and performed in the Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio Theatre in June 2010. Jocelyn has chaired and been a judge on various panels including the British Composer Awards, Ivor Novello Awards and BBC Proms Young Composers Competition.
Michael Hulls
Lighting Designer
Michael first worked with Akram 10 years ago on his early works Fix and Rush and more recently on In-I his duet with Juliette Binoche.
Michael trained in dance and theatre at Dartington College and was awarded a bursary by the Arts Council to attend dance lighting workshops with Jennifer Tipton in New York and Paris. Over the last 20 years he has worked exclusively in dance, particularly with choreographer Russell Maliphant. Their collaborations have won international critical acclaim and many awards: Sheer won a Time Out Award for Outstanding Collaboration, Choice won a South Bank Show Dance Award, Push won four major awards including the Olivier for Best New Dance Production and most recently AfterLight won two Critics Circle awards. Michael and Russell also collaborated on Broken Fall, commissioned by George Piper Dances, which also won an Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production.
He has also worked with Javier De Frutos on the pieces Cattle Call, Paseillo, Los Picadores, Blue Roses, and the controversial Eternal Damnation, and with Jonathan Burrows on The Stop Quartet, and on Walking/Music, commissioned by William Forsythe for Ballett Frankfort.
Eonnagata, Michael’s recent collaboration with Sylvie Guillem, Robert Lepage and Russell Maliphant, for which Michael won the 2009 Knight of Illumination Award for Dance, opened at Sadler’s Wells and along with AfterLight led to Michael being nominated for the 2010 Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance.
In 2009 Michael was delighted to be invited to become an Associate Artist of Sadler’s Wells.
Michael is currently working with Javier on a new work for Rambert which will premiere at Sadler’s Wells in November and on a new full length creation with Russell inspired by the works of Rodin.
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