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Akram Kahn Company: Bah

Inarguably, London's Akram Khan is an engaging maker of movement. Just about all of the dance in "bahok," in performance through Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is intelligent and fresh, and some of it is spellbinding.

Close to the end of this 75-minute work, in what amounts to a climax, Khan and longtime collaborator, composer Nitin Sawhney, manage one of those rare apices marrying music and dance. Sawhney's seductive score, a rambling, intermittent symphony of noise and melody, reaches a soaring point in volume and beauty as the dancers lunge forward, at first, and then come to complete stillness in the sense that their feet stop moving. But their arms swing, like blades of a windmill, accelerating to near jet propulsion, repeating their circular gyrations as if kids gone mad on a playground. You are both moved at the artistic audacity and just slightly worried your own theater seat may take off in flight--there's that much energy.

Meanwhile, Khan's ensemble rearrangements, both before and after this stretch, are graced with a gossamer, minimalist design. As most of the dancers move in unison, one, two, or three break away into something else, but so beautifully dotted throughout the larger grouping, and so quickly changing, that you have to watch feverishly to follow them before giving up and surrendering to Khan's overall magic spell. As audience members, we're intrigued, then excited and finally rendered putty in his hands.

Unfortunately, "bahok," created in 2008, is better throughout in its dance than its dramaturgy. A fairly straightforward dance theater piece, it's set in a train station of the mind, its passengers a diverse hodgepodge of nationalities, its waiting area a Godot-like land of no exit and existential trap. In itself, that's trite now, going all the way back to such forgotten dramas as Sutton Vane's 1923 "Outward Bound," and Khan doesn't really do that much with it. The messages at the end meant as philosophical codas, broadcast on the computerized arrival-departure board that's part of the lean set, are too obvious: "Are you lost?" or "Where are you going?" And Khan relies on such shopworn emblems of sterile modern life as the cell phone. Moments of vaudeville intended as comic relief aren't that funny, as when, after a tower-of-Babel-like brouhaha, the cast goes in for a group hug, one loner left out to crawl around and atop the ensemble to try and force her way in. Second-rate Marx Brothers.

There is a moment of genuinely witty dance, when a somewhat short man, partnering a tall woman in a sequence of rough-hewn ballet, has to jump into the air to manage the classic position of a male partner holding the ballerina in place. There's also one intriguing dramatic sequence, wherein a woman and her Korean friend struggle to communicate with a customs official and each other, a sequence beautifully acted, funny, scary and apt--epitomizing the weariness and fright of traveling internationally today.

And, the disappointing dramatic tropes aside, "bahok" is flush with Khan's rightly respected mastery of choreography, performed here by a smart, daredevil and speedy company on tour. Khan employs classic grounded contemporary dance, tinged with bone-crushing danger and martial art stress, but often prettified paradoxically by the most delicate hand work. Right before or after you watch a dancer collapse painfully to the floor, the wrists will flick like grace notes, or, in the case of one especially liquid-like gentleman, the trunk will undulate with gorgeous serpentine silkiness.

Best of all, during the stretches of eminently viewable dance, Khan and company engage in a typical series of modern moves, backward runs and floor rolls among them, but with that inimitable drive and cohesion that marks truly compelling choreography. Plenty of contemporary choreographers employ the same moves. But it's rare talents, and Khan is assuredly one of them, who manage such a sequence so that, by the end of it, you feel not so much you've witnessed a string of unrelated moves as you've been grabbed unexpectedly and taken on a journey. For my money, Khan has no need of a traveler's setting to accomplish it.

Reviewed by Sid Smith on 02/27/2010 at 10:37 AM