Last Wednesday, I went to Royce Hall, on the UCLA campus, to see Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan perform a 75 minute work they call Sacred Monsters.
They are as unlikely a pair as could be. Guillem is the famous French Prima Ballerina discovered by Rudolph Nureyev, and Khan is a British-Asian dancer and choreographer known for fusing Western contemporary dance with Indian classical kathak. Tall, fair, impossibly narrow Sylvie is adored for her seemingly jointless body, amazing extension, feet to drive the fetishist mad with longing, and impeccable lyricism. Kahn is dark, compact, percussive, and his roots are firmly planted in classical Indian dance. But of course the pairing works; his dark to her light, her melody to his rhythm, ying meets yang – you get the idea.
At first I found myself wishing I’d seen Guillem in her hey day as a ballerina dancing Raymonda or Swan Lake. But then I realized I was watching something far more intimate and original, and I got lost in the pair’s remarkable pas de deux that seemed to cover the full range of human emotion in a light but still penetrating way.
It wasn’t a typical pas de deux by any means. Sometimes one performed solo as the other sat nearby on stage, sometimes they performed together, and at other time they performed at the same time, but apart from one another. At one point Guillem sat and braided her hair. At another the two chatted while mopping the floor by dragging towels around with their feet. But they always worked in relation to one another, as artists, as woman and man, as inhabitants of two distinctly different worlds reaching out to discover something new.
Through dance, dialogue and music they touched on themes of fame, doubt and expectation, and ended by performing what looked very much like children jumping rope.
I was disarmed completely and it was a fantastic ending to an otherwise tedious day. I drove home with my shoes off and the sun roof open . The moon was full and the music, a mesmerizing mix of live voice and Western and Eastern instruments, stayed with me the whole way home.
Here is video of Sylvie performing Raymonda:
Vox Pop Sudari 