Though focused on contemporary dance, Akram Khan can’t keep away from the classics. The British-Bangladeshi choreographer first broke into the world of ballet in 2016, when he reimagined Giselle for the English National Ballet. Khan pulled the gauzy Romantic ballet out of its feudal-folk setting and placed it in a sweatshop in the industrial hinterlands. More powerfully still, he held audiences captive with his utterly singular vocabulary. Ballet and kathak (a form of classical Indian dance) are joined in nothing short of alchemy. “It is the world I live in,” Khan says. “I can’t differentiate the two.” Which brings us to Khan’s much awaited Creature, premiering next week at Sadler’s Wells, in London.
This meaty, full-length work, his second for E.N.B., taps two 19th-century classics—Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, and Georg Büchner’s 1837 play, Woyzeck. Both feature tortured protagonists who are subject to experiments of human engineering.
