"Let me tell you a story," says Akram Khan, choreographer, dancer, singer and conceiver of extraordinary modern dance performance ma, some ten or twenty minutes into the show. Parts of his story are in a language unfamiliar to me, others are incoherent, or lapse into nonsense repetitions of simple words, tak and thum (sky and earth) repeated at machine-gun speed until they become just another beat in the fast percussion that drives the dancers. Other parts of the story are humorous, familiar, and involving; the text is written by Hanif Kureshi, the music by Riccardo Nova. There is a sense of performing among giants, and it is to the dancers' credit that they are not overpowered by their material, but instead respond to Khan's story with individuality, humour and vigour, and join in with stories of their own. More insistent still is their restless dialogue with the music, a driving beat born of multiple musical traditions, the voice of Faheem Mazhar (Khan's collaborator on classical kathat solos) over Natalie Rozario's astonishingly adaptable cello and percussionist B. C. Manjunath's complicated beats, building up layers of exotic sound, music with an almost physical presence; something that can be caught, thrown, captured. The dancers taunt it, play with it, protect each other from its sadness and strength. Sometimes it is the thread drawing them upwards though movements that seem physically implausible, if not impossible; at other times it beats them to the ground, as if gravity were a thing to be courted and cajoled. As the narrative re-emerges, the dancers step through the shapes of lemurs, cut-down trees, the cracked earth that returns incomprehensible answers; and for a moment there is a secret glimpse into the ground, and the injustices and secrets it holds, a forgotten cave of unfamiliar stories, ancient and strange.

Jeremy Dennis, 09/03/2005