Aakash Odedra Company: Murmur / Inked, Linbury Studio

A protégé of Akram Khan’s and confirmed star of the classical Indian Kathak and Bharat Natyam dance scene, Aakash Odedra is expanding his range. In this double bill, two solos explore the dancer’s own dyslexia, and the art of tattoos.

Odedra is similar to his mentor Khan in the speed of his movement, but his body is slight with whiplike limbs and huge brown eyes. While recent projects have seen him branching into contemporary dance, and working with the Royal Ballet, the articulate hands, rhythmic feet and whirling dervish turns of his Kathak training are the vital core of his movement.

Murmur:

It’s often said that dance is a universal language, and a young Odedra took that literally when words and letters proved unreliable for him. Co-created with Australian choreographer Lewis Major, this is a ‘duet with dyslexia,’ both representing the experience and finding a solution in dance.

Austrian organisation Ars Electronica Futurelab is responsible for the striking lighting and animation. Silhouettes of white light follow Odedra about the stage, and flocks of white birds swirl out from falling paper pages like letters shifting unreliably on a page. It’s an intriguing new setting for Odedra’s classical movements.

Aakash Odedra: Inked

At once ancient and modern, the art of marking one’s own body in self-expression is ideal territory for choreographer Damien Jalet, whose work is often animal and ritualistic, more like rites than performance, and headily involving. Odedra dips fingers into a pot of black ink, marking face and body like war paint. In sweeping, rhythmic circles he dances strangely symmetrical patterns of ink across the stage. Odedra’s background, a dance form steeped in tradition and spirituality, will make this a mesmerising performance.