Welcome to the The Silent Burn Project.
This programme is dedicated to everyone who has walked with us on this unpredictable 20-year adventure. It’s for all the company members and artists from start to present, and for those who feel silenced and who are yet to find their voice.
The extended version of Clouds of Witnesses is now available for you to watch here. The feature included in the programme is the first part of a much larger conversation!
The Silent Burn Project presents newly created dance and music films recorded all around the world that will transport you from your homes. Shot mainly in outdoor spaces, the short dance films feature our Company artists: Yen-Ching Lin, Ching-Ying Chien, Theo TJ Lowe, Kristina Alleyne, Sadé Alleyne, Kennedy Junior Muntanga, and Akram Khan himself. We invited a few of our beloved musicians Sohini Alam, Nina Harries, B C Manjunath, David Azurza and Chitra Poornima Sathish to perform parts of heartrending pieces you might be familiar with.
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“After twenty years of unearthing, discovering, and retelling through new lenses, this is a moment for me to reflect and to look back at the footsteps that we at AKC have taken collectively.” – Akram Khan
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As part of the programme we spent some time discussing themes that organically weaved themselves into the fabric of our Company productions. Clouds of Witnesses, which explores Otherness, welcomes American ballerina Misty Copeland, British poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Indian cultural critic Rustom Bharucha, South East Asian cultural activist Eddin Khoo and British lecturer in theatre Royona Mitra.
We felt compelled to assemble another group of exhilarating voices for Hijacking God, to examine the subject of God and transcendental experiences. British anthropologist Jerome Lewis, Indian dancer and researcher Jayachandran Surendran, and Indonesian writer and activist Ayu Utami speak candidly about their research and personal perspectives. Both of the conversations will undoubtedly encourage you to expand and deliberate on these topics with one another.
We believe in emphasising that we couldn’t have been able to rise without having fallen several times. Akram and his close collaborators, dramaturg Ruth Little, composer Vincenzo Lamagna, creative associate Mavin Khoo and dancer Joy Alpuerto Ritter, walk you through never-seen-before archive footage captured by Maxime Dos. In the three-part docu-series Symphony of Fingerprints, you’ll hear from each of them on their moments of doubt, challenges and vulnerability through the creative process.
We will also be opening the studio doors once more, with a Classical Intensive documentary, The Surrendering Clown. This feature highlights our legacy work and dives deeply into the Company’s practice.
We hope you find The Silent Burn Project as inspiring to watch as it was for us to make. To help us continue our storytelling into the next decade, visit our Support Us page to contribute to our future. Thank you, as always, for your love and support.
“To stage an Akram Khan production is a painstaking process: this is not just about perfecting technique, but getting layers of meaning (artistic, social, personal) into the dance.“
“The rest delves into what goes on behind the scenes. A chat between Khan and his producer Farooq Chaudhry remembers the hunger and naivety of their early days.“
