Royona Mitra's book is the first monograph on the work of the British-Bangladeshi choreographer and dancer Akram Khan. Like Khan, Mitra is trained in South Asian kathak (p. xi), which makes her particularly well suited for the task of assessing Khan's work. Mitra's hypothesis is that Khan is ‘transforming the landscape of British and global contemporary dance through his own embodied approach to new interculturalism’ (p. 10). Mitra defines Khan's ‘new interculturalism’ as negotiation of ‘the tricky terrain between his inherited relationships with Bangladesh and his own embodied Britishness’ (p. 92) and distinguishes it from ‘old’ interculturalism in that the latter, in Mitra's view, tended to represent non-Western cultures to a Western audience.
The book argues that, taking a cue from his own cultural hybridity, Khan embraces intercultural collaboration as a necessary starting point for any creation, working with dancers from various cultural backgrounds who specialize in different dance techniques – ballet, khatak, classical Indian dance, contemporary – merging them in an experimental aesthetics. Mitra places Khan's work in a dialogue with political contexts such as the anti-Muslim Euro-centrism of urban gentrification. She discusses, for example, Khan's artistic reflections on anti-Muslim discourses emerging after the London bombings of 7 July 2005, highlighting how Khan's aesthetic discourse transgresses any dichotomy between the Western/European and Muslims as ‘Other’. One particularly poignant instance of this is Abide with Me, which Khan choreographed for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London in 2012. In this piece, the figure of the Boy, a nine-year-old British-Asian performer, becomes, according to Mitra, a ‘universal symbol of the future of multicultural Britain’ (p. 5).
In the introduction, Mitra discusses Khan's oeuvre as an answer to Peter Brook's The Mahabharata and the concept of ‘intercultural theatre’ that emerged in the 1980s. While criticizing Brook's concept of interculturalism, due to its appropriation of other cultures to benefit a Western audience (and Western academic discourse), Mitra reminds us that Khan himself performed the central dramatic figure for Brook's adaptation of the complex Indian myth for a Western imaginary, which influenced many of Khan's creations.
Works extensively examined in the seven chapters that follow are organized under the headings ‘Corporeal Gestures’ (exploring Gnosis, 2010), ‘Auto-ethnography’ (Loose in Flight, 1999), ‘Third Space Politics’ (Zero Degrees, 2005, and Desh, 2011), ‘Mobility and Flexibility’ (Bahok, 2008) and ‘Queering Normativity’ (iTMOi, 2013). Finally, Mitra argues that these aesthetic strategies interrelate in such a way that ‘Khan's new interculturalism rewrites both Western and South Asian dramaturgies’ (p. 155). This is, according to Mitra, achieved by challenging audiences to translate the multilayered aesthetics into their own realities (p. 158). Khan's disturbance of homogeneous notions of identity transgresses any binary distinction of the West versus the Other, which haunt former concepts of intercultural performance.
Mitra makes complex theoretical connections highly accessible, and describes Khan's art in a multilayered, non-linear way. Through her understanding of ‘interculturalism’ as embodied practice, she brings the discourse of postcolonial theatre studies close to dance studies. My only criticism is that the use of ‘new’ in ‘new interculturalism’ implies a linear temporality and progress, which does not fully do justice to Mitra's complex thinking.
All in all, the book is to be read both as an introduction to post-structural dance studies and cultural studies, and as an example of a study of the oeuvre of a single artist. How dance studies are inextricably connected with postcolonial and queer theory is also made apparent here. Researchers interested in debates concerning postcolonial dance will find abundant material.
