Binoche & Khan
Kate Temple-West, theater director, herbalist and Dancemeditator, muses on a recent dance/theatrer collaboration at BAM.
Binoche & Khan
–by Kate Temple-West
Intrigued by the tagline “an actor dances and a dancer acts,” I bought a ticket to In/I as part of Brooklyn Academy of Music’s NextWave festival. The actor happened to be Juliette Binoche, so there it was. Dancer and choreographer Akram Khan was also very easy to fall in love with. I loved his Kathak-inspired dance and his relentless questioning of self. His elegant movement stacked on challenges, building out from each of his most surprising variations.
The piece was clearly being choreographed from a male point of view. Binoche was the woman in the red dress: tantalizing, imploring, demanding, feinting, rejecting, but always shaped by Khan’s movement.
Binoche is a genius collaborator given this constraint, as she’s managed to carve her true spirit out of the form of the male gaze in her impressive 20 plus year film and stage career. The most powerful part of the piece was watching her witnessing Khan– not moving, saying, or doing anything at all on the surface.
Kahn and Binoche handled her dance limitations very cleverly. She moves from her core, with very little energetic help from the sky. She was costumed in clunky shoes that emphasized her earth bound state, and Kahn lifted her first in a pose that evoked, for me anyway, the hanged man of the tarot, later lifting her like a trophy, and later still like a burden before finally suspending her, magician-like, in mid-air.
Although the piece was focused on a romantic relationship, the dynamic between the two delved into the desire for love and the frustrations of truly being present with another. ‘I don’t see you, I don’t see you,’ Binoche chanted/taunted at Kahn after his solo, but the tone of her voice and her stillness said, ‘You don’t see me.’
Despite all of that, the connection between the two was quite beautiful throughout. By the end they did see each other, or they both recognized what they didn’t or couldn’t see.
I greedily wanted more of this piece, an act two, which I probably won’t get as Binoche says ‘dancing is damn hard’. She says that she is ‘just learning about how to hold the energy’ and is studying Chi Gung. She’d love Dancemeditation…
Afterward the performance I was able to eavesdrop on other audience member’s reactions. Some of the female theater people were frustrated by the choreography– ‘Binoche didn’t get to be strong enough! If I’d been directing…’ Some of the dance people were frustrated by Binoche’s dancing.
It was a messy, provoking piece of dance and theater that left me pondering the mystery of how to truly witness each other when we desire to be loved.
check out Kate’s blog
