‘Movement is life,’ Akram Khan says on ‘Outwitting the Devil’
“We need to understand: inaction over climate change is a political choice,” award-winning dancer and choreographer Akram Khan told the Athens-Macedonian News Agency (ANA-MPA), shortly before his company returns to Greece with its latest production, “Outwitting the Devil.”
The Akram Khan Company is making two stops in Greece on its tour of Europe, performing a work inspired by the newly discovered fragment of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world’s earliest surviving great works of literature.
The production is described as “a concentrated epic about ritual and remembering,” which explores the uneven distribution and exhaustion of natural resources, the thirst for power, patriarchy and the transiency of human existence on the Earth.
In a landscape of broken tablets and fallen idols, its six characters trade their remaining wealth and stories, seeking to make whole the fragments of ancient knowledge lost and forgotten over time. In the Gilgamesh epic, the hero is punished by the gods for destroying the legendary cedar forest and killing its keeper.
“People want changes but change requires movement and I don’t know how ready people are for action. Movement is life. Dance was always my way to make changes to myself,” Khan told the ANA-MPA.
First shown in Stuttgart to rave reviews, “Outwitting the Devil” will be performed in Greece on two nights, on September 28 at the Herod Atticus Odeon in Athens and on October 5 at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall. [ANA-MPA]
