Art's Place: Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan - or Akram Khan and Sylvie Guillem

(Standing ovation for Sacred Monsters at UCLA Royce Hall on May 2, with Sylvie Guillem, right, and Akram Khan, left.)

SYLVIE GUILLEM was the draw for SACRED MONSTERS, her show with AKRAM KHAN last Wednesday at UCLA, through UCLA Live's great dance series. It was a great show, perhaps too short. And though my ballet fandom brought me in for Sylvie - who I got, and liked - I left with Akram on my mind.

The title "Sacred Monsters," the program explains, is a literal translation for a French term, monstres sacres, used to describe big stars in a particular art form. We had Sylvie Guillem, a huge star in the ballet world, and Akram Khan, who I was less familiar with, is a dancer and choreographer with Kathak (a form of classical Indian dance) and contemporary dance backround. Khan is a sought after contemporary choreographer, I presume mostly in Europe right now..? (Sorry I don't know as much about him, but YouTube yields many clips, and I'll certainly be hunting for more info now, having seen this performance). The piece was about both artists' reaching deeper into different parts of their artform: Guillem in her shift from the strict classicism of ballet to more contemporary types of movement, and Khan in a similar transition, doing something contemporary or different with his contemporary and Kathak dance backgrounds.

Guillem was the title draw for me: she was and still is a ballet star of international stature. In the 80s, she was a making waves at the Paris Opera Ballet under Rudolf Nureyev. Her remarkable technical ability (extremely arched feet, limbs that could fly to her head) as well as an intense, dramatic stage presence brought her to the front of that company extremely quickly. But her desire to guest with other companies soon had her outgrowing the POB, and she left the company, much to the company's shock, and became a principal guest with the Royal Ballet. (She has now indicated that her principal guesting there, too, is now over.)

As she has outgrown her classical roles, both as her technical ability to do them as declined with age and as her emotional maturity has made her tired of performing them, she has started doing much more contemporary work. Sacred Monsters represents one of these contemporary explorations, and here she partnered with Akram Khan, whose primary dance idiom has been classical Indian, specifically Bengali folk dancing. Using her catchet in the dance world, the pair are touring the work around the world with a band of musicians.

(Right: Photo by Tristram Kenton)

The 65-minute piece began slowly, with two solos. In the first, Guillem had chains not so subtly attached to her wrists, which she threw off at the beginning of the solo (none-to-subtle shucking of her classical 'chains'), then she launched into an extended piece slow dance, where she threw her legs around like Gumby and slow brought her super arched feet up for display. When she was done, Khan did his solo, with elements from Bengali folk dance, but dancing in non-descript contemporary clothing instead. Khan's dancing was about footwork on the floor, with intricate steps whose sounds created aural rhythms, and which also propelled him across the stage and through turns. He then broke the sound wall and spoke directly to the audience: Khan was struggling, he said, about what to do in his dancing as he found himself going bald. The characters he needed to play in classical Indian dance all had hair, and here was losing his own - what was he to do, he asked. The frustration over this came to a duet with Guillem; it was fast and performed like animation panels jolting forward in a stop-motion fashion. In one funny moment Khan stopped for a drink of water when Guillem scooted off stage. She returned to glare, he guiltily put the bottle back down in three stop frames. After this segment, Guillem spoke to the audience. While humorously shoving parts of her bod around with the other hand or leg, she told a story about how she tried to learn Italian by reading Charlie Brown books. Her attitude was haughtier tham Khan's - Khan allowed Guillem's interjections to his monologues as interaction, but Guillem glaced up at Khan when he interjected, then turned back to the audience and said, "Anyway.." After more brief solos, there was a pas de deux, more akin to what we'd expect in Western concert dance. Here, their two very different personalities came together artistically - him supporting hers, and hers moving towards agreement with his. Lots of lifts and gymnastic bends, ie her legs wrapped around his waist as she back bended out towards the audience.

I found myself liking Khan more because he just seemed like a friendlier personality. And in a piece where the dancers were supposedly opening up to us about their artistic growth, I was more interested in Akram's. Guillem's personality was colder and loftier. She was up and farther away, a diva in the truest sense, while he was closer to the us mortal non-dance-professional audience members down on the ground. I also loved the movement I saw out of him; it had character and a personal style. The dancing was grounded and fast, all that zipping around was pretty spectacular to see. Not that Guillem wasn't interesting, also, just her super-human abilities created a distancing effect. Her self-exploration of the art was truly her own; Khan's exploration was rooted in a much more the much more human discovery of a common flaw: balding. The Guillem-watching was more interesting from a ballet fan's perespective of seeing an artist mature and grow. This dancing was definitely not Swan Lake, and also a departure from Manon, a very dramatic role that she has taken to dancing of late.

Here are some YouTube clipsI found, for visuals: