Akram Khan RUSH Review

Akram Khan RUSH Review

Khan won the Jerwood Foundation Award for choreography last year and its easy to see why. Rush is stylised around the idea of skydiving/ free falling this is the motif for the dance. Akram Khan combines a form of Classical Indian dance (named khatak) with contemporary dance creating his own hybrid dance. 

To show the idea of free falling, Khan incorporated the physical movements of sky diving into the dance movement, using a parachute-shaped arm line, reaching across to the left side of the body to pull the chord. This is shown only once in the piece at the start so it shows that Akram has thought through every move to capture the true free falling effect. Khan wanted to explore each sense that is used when free falling; look, touch, smell, feel and taste. The music used in Rush was composed by Andy Cowton.

Dressed in black, the three stand facing the audience in a triangle formation as the music begins like a soft distant airplane engine. In Khatak, the main movement is focused above the waist, from the chest, arms and hands - and here the dancers perform the gestures and motifs either in sequence or together, calling out rhythm changes in the traditional way. The music in the piece was fitting for the dance in every way and this shows how closely the pair worked to together in order to create the best dance and musical  colaboration. Khan was interested in the contrast of stillness and speed, he portrayed this by using different tempos within the entire dance. He also researched thouroughly the spacing as when free falling your body movement is very restricted because of the forces hitting your body from different angles  so you also can experience feelings of claustrophobia and slow restricted movement.