Akram Khan, Israel Galván — Torobaka | Hellerau, Dresden

What links Indian classical dance kathak and Spanish flamenco? Rhythmically complex steps, sophisticated work of the fingers and palms, ceremonial posture. Both dances present formative historical cultural elements and reach out dramatically into time and space. In 2014 legends of world dance Akram Khan and Israel Galván chimed their bodies to the rhythmic structures of both dances. Their performance together is an event that happens only once in a decade.

The Moving Audience Program is made possible with the support of the European project Theatron.

Akram Khan; Israel Galván: the very euphony of their names sets the scene. Dance before it became art. This transition, this intermediary space, this interstice is where they operate.

This is not an ethnic exchange between traditions, an exercise in global dance. It is about creating something from a way of understanding dance – derived, certainly, from dancing kathak and flamenco – that harks back to the origins of voice and of gesture, before they began to produce meaning. Mimesis rather than mimicry.

The bull (toro) and the cow (vaca), sacred animals in the dancers’ two traditions, but united, profaned in an unconstrained dadaist poem. Israel Galván and Akram Khan. This is what it is about, dancing without compromise and for the audience to go on perceiving it as art.