Unforgettable fire | 4 February 2016

How much of a compromise does a fashionable choreographer loved by all have to make with his paymasters? When he’s unfashionable, it’s only the Arts Council he has to please. When the world wants a piece of him, he has London’s Sadler’s Wells and the Roundhouse, Grenoble, Paris, Luxembourg, Montreal, Hong Kong, Taipei, Wolfsburg, Brighton, Amiens, Bruges, Amsterdam, Rheims and Leicester producers all tugging at his sleeve, offering support for the quasi-divine creation but wanting to get their spanner into the works somewhere.

In which light I take my hat off to Khan. A fortnight after seeing his Until The Lions at the Roundhouse, ground down at the time by pain and dulled by medicine, and fussing over every fault, I find myself now remembering and chewing over some of those sights and impressions. Sponsoritis can no doubt be blamed for the self-conscious artificiality of happy-clappy fusion musicians around the stage. The Roundhouse is a pretty dangerous place to put dance in. The proximity of our faces all around the little circular arena, reading the programme, checking our phones, has nothing like the antique intensity of illiterate villagers gathered to hear the travelling storytellers in the street.

But there were gorgeous, visionary sights such as only Akram can do. A scampering animal spirit, a world split and riven by fire and danger, a woman going up in flames, a stern, lamentational love duet of might-have-been, and everywhere, glistening, the tiny kathak-specific foot- and fingerwork of his background. Tim Yip (who designed the awesome DESH for Khan) has created a fantastic huge stump of an ancient ringed tree, split and unstable, its sections heaving with subterranean gusts and fires produced by lighting wizard Michael Hulls.