The Stage

Zero degrees of separation - Akram Khan, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Nitin Sawhney and Anthony Gormley

Published Friday 1 July 2005 at 17:25 by Katie Phillips

Sadler’s Wells is hosting the world premiere of a collaborative work by four artists at the top of their respective fields. Katie Phillips discovers what inspired choreographers Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, composer Nitin Sawhney and sculptor Anthony Gormley to join forces

Musician, producer and all round musical genius Nitin Sawhney is best associated with dance in the commercial club sense.

This week, from July 8, he will join forces with contemporary choreographers and a visual artist in a grand scale artistic collaboration - Zero Degrees - for its world premier dance theatre production at Sadler’s Wells.

In actual fact, Sawhney has always had a particular affinity with the practice of dance on a wider scale as his mum was a Bharata Natyam dancer and he himself studied the music rather than the movement from an early age. He is also a skilled flamenco guitar player, a mode of music strongly integrated with the dance form and which is actually based on the rhythms of the traditional Indian dance, Kathak.

So, although some might think the split leap from smooth Indo-Western trip-hop grooves to the weird and wonderful realms of contemporary dance is a strange and gigantic one, it’s a mere shrug of the shoulders for this seriously chilled Jack of all trades. Although he sometimes works alone on creating music, Sawhney is definitely no stranger to collaboration. He racks up an impressive list of projects on the go, which include live DJing, a new album, community music projects, film scores, orchestral composition, creating musicals, lecturing, writing… the list goes on.

Sawhney has worked with contemporary dance before, having collaborated with British-Bangladeshi choreographer Akram Khan on Fix in 2001 and Kaash in 2002. He says of Khan: “Technically he’s unbelievable. I don’t think there’s anyone quite like him in that respect.”

Khan is happy to be working with Sawhney again and is revelling in the collaboration with the team of four creative giants, which includes artist Anthony Gormley, best know for his sculpture Angel of the North and Belgian-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. “I have been a huge fan of Nitin and Anthony for a long time,” he says. He describes the team as “people on the same journey but in different places, who say similar things through different art forms”.

Zero Degrees promises to herald a wide and varied audience, splicing together fans of the best contemporary musicians, choreographers and visual artists. But Khan insists that it is not just a commercial gimmick of pulling together well-respected artistic giants and famous names to grab a crowd. He says: “It’s very exciting to work for artists of that calibre. Not just because of their names but because I can learn from them as an artist.” The important thing for him in this collaborative process is, he explains, “compromising and risking something else on another territory”.

As to whether Zero Degrees will snatch muso audiences away from Sawhney’s live gigs or Virgin Megastore and propel them along to the theatre, Sawhney comments: “Well Kaash sold out constantly. Then again so does everything Akram does. And everything I do sells out and Anthony has a massive following.”

The idea for the piece, born from a story of Khan’s travels through India, led to discussions with Cherkaoui. The styles of these two choreographers’ work seem radically different. Cherkaoui’s shock tactics - wild and colourful theatricality, brutal energy and gruesome political layers - are a far cry from Khan’s bold, elegant and inventive pure dance fusion of classical Indian Kathak and contemporary. Khan describes this difference as the ethos of the piece and the point of their collaboration.

“My work starts off as movement and moves towards theatre. He starts from theatre and moves towards movement. We are trying to find the middle ground, the zero degrees from each point.”

Sawhney describes his perception of Zero degrees as “a point of between. Different states of change or different states of being. The borders of life and death. The point between life and death. Part of Hindi philosophy is about being in the present, not always drifting to the past or future - it’s about equilibrium and balance”.

Khan is quick to explain that, despite the serious subject matter, “it is not necessarily a dark piece. It explores the notion that zero degrees is a journey to be aware of the in-between points”. Known for breaking boundaries and exploring states of “con-fusion”, Khan talks freely about the cultural significance of the work and the meeting points with his own cross-cultural ethnicity. This idea clearly permeates the work for both Khan and Cherkaoui.

“We are both in an in-between - me with Asian and Western culture and for Larbi, Flemish and Moroccan. When I’m in Bangladesh I feel British and when I’m in Britain I feel Bangladeshi. I belong to both and I belong to neither. It is the same with him.”

It’s something that Sawhney however, seems to be indifferent to. Both Sawhney’s music and Khan’s dancing - to Joe Public, at least - clearly bring together modern ideas and traditional Indian sentiments. For Khan, it is Kathak and contemporary and for Sawhney, tabla rhythms and funky beats. But the term fusion is something that Sawhney disagrees with. In fact he is distinctly perturbed and even slightly aggravated by such a classification.

“People don’t have an awareness, or know how to bring in knowledge of other cultures around the world. It’s like being stuck in a cage. It’s not a fusion, that’s very contrived because it makes it seem like something that’s being forced rather than a seamless flow,” he says. He would like both his music and the piece to be about “the synchronicity of ideas”.

Cherkaoui is the middle ground, the Zero Degrees, some might say, between the two.

“It includes certain things about identity. Everything is a mix of what you’ve learnt. It’s not about east meets west but east meets south and south meets north.”

For him, it is all clearly about the learning curve and collaborative spirit more than anything else.

“Akram is a dancer with a huge tradition. Rhythmically it’s amazing what he is able to do. Watching him work with Nitin is really intriguing. He [Sawhney] is extremely fast in his understanding of his way to compose. The rhythmical mathematics patterns are fascinating to listen to and it’s a very organic process. To work with those things is teaching me a lot.”

Cherkaoui, who also has an eclectic background having worked in contemporary, hip hop, modern jazz and Broadway dance, often prefers to stand back and assess his own choreographic work from a distance. In this piece, however, it will be just the two of them dancing, with Gormley’s sculptures and live musicians on the stage.

Zero Degrees is a meeting of great creative minds who have built a piece of work by sharing artistic ideas and languages. For the collaborators these consist of geographical and personal borders. For some, these are political, for others, philosophical but they are, for all, artistic. For the audience, this is a rare treat.

• Zero Degrees will receive its world premiere at Sadler’s Wells on July 8 and will run until July 16.