Akram Khan's Last Solo Dance - Xenos

Date: Nov 16-18 - 7:30 pm

Venue: Shanghai International Dance Centre

The text for Xenos, by acclaimed Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill, gives voice to the shell-shocked dream of a colonial Indian soldier in no man's land. Many of the sepoys who died in conflict were buried abroad, while for those who returned home, often mutilated and traumatized, another form of erasure followed, as their stories were interred in archives following the rise of Indian nationalism and the rejection of colonial rule. Separated from their own histories, homelands, and countrymen, they became xenoi. Xenos is a lament for the body in war, and a memento mori for our own times of violent estrangement from one another and our world. Xenos reveals the beauty and horror of the human condition in its portrait of an Indian dancer whose skilled body becomes an instrument of war. "X" is no man and everyman, the unknown and the eternal soldier, alone in a foreign land, a stranger to himself and to an enemy he does not know.