Dance

By contrast, Khan, a London-born Bangladeshi, has been a dancer since he was a very young child, and was still in his early teens when he spent two years touring the world in Peter Brook’s epic production ‘Mahabharata’. ‘His process,’ says Khan, ‘of taking away to the bare essentials leaves you with very raw, very powerful things that can be magical. I hope that’s what I learned from him.’

After a string of solos in the late 1990s, and a Time Out Live Award in 2000, Khan launched his company in 2002. Now both he and Guillem are associate artists at Sadler’s Wells. ‘I don’t feel like I’m dancing with a star,’ he says. ‘I’m dancing with an artist – Sylvie is so generous, so giving.’

‘Physically,’ she says, ‘we are completely different, and Akram is smaller than me. Next to him,’ Guillem laughs, ‘I am a tall asparagus waving in the breeze.’ Feature continues

‘We have respect for each other,’ he adds, ‘respect for our two different classical worlds. Something we share very much is the journey of trying to achieve the illusion of perfection. If anything, that’s what the classical world is about.’ ‘Sacred Monsters’ mixes Guillem’s innate elegance with Khan’s awesome skills in the percussive Indian dance style known as kathak – you have never seen a body move so fast or with such precision. Their aim is a new hybrid vision of what dance might become.

Throughout the 75-minute performance neither of them ever leaves the stage. They may trade riffs and exchange dialogue, and each may occasionally slip into the background to give the other dancer his or her head, but they are indelibly fused throughout.

‘I needed to be a bit scared again,’ Guillem says with a kind of matter-of-fact assurance. ‘I’m a learner,’ she says. ‘I was born a learner; I don’t know for what, but…’ a long pause, ‘I keep trying. I know that I am impatient. I know that I want things to be right from the beginning, and that means sometimes I miss things. Now I have discovered that I need to put things a bit more into perspective. Step by step. I think, I hope, it is a journey towards wisdom.’

In addition to Khan’s choreography, ‘Sacred Monsters’ includes a contribution from Lin Hwai-Min, the celebrated artistic director of the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan. He claims that Guillem is quite simply the most intelligent dancer he has ever worked with.

‘Older is better,’ Guillem insists. ‘You have maturity, you have experiences, and you want to live all the minutes.’