Akram Khan RUSH Review

Khan won the Jerwood Foundation Award for choreography last year and its easy to see why. Rush is stylised around the idea of skydiving and free falling this is the motif of the dance. Akram Khan combines a form if Classic Indian dance called khatak with contemporary which created his own hybrid of dance. 

He shows his style of free falling by using a parachute-shaped arm line, reaching across the body to pull the chord. That's only in the beginning of he dance so it shows that Akram has thought through every move to perfectly capture the free falling effect. Akram Khan wanted to explore each sense that is alerted when free falling; look, touch, smell, feel and taste.

Dressed in black, the three stand with their backs to us as the music begins like swishing water sprinklers then splits the ears. As in Kathak, the power is focused above the waist, from the chest, arms and hands - and here the dancers perform the gestures and motifs either in sequence or together, calling outrhythm changes in the traditional way. Even the music used in Rush composed by Andy Cowton fitted perfectly the style and motif of Rush. Akram Khan was interested in the contrast between stillness and speed and therefore portrayed this using different tempos within the dance. He also thought about space as when free falling of course you have all the room in the world but you're restricted by force so you also can experience feelings of claustrophobia. So he allowed the dance to have moments if spacial restriction and spacial freedom.