I have yet to watch an Akram Khan piece I didn’t like, and I really did like Night of Remembering (Théâtre de la Ville de Paris, October 2025). It’s very… Akramy. Dark, mystical and viscerally intense and some very boomz very interesting very insane hairography.
The gruelling nature of the choreography was partly what made it compelling, but at the back of my head I was thinking, ‘wait the dancers are going to be doing this every day for [checks program] the next 3 weeks?’
It looked so physical that I felt like I should have paid for my ticket in painkillers and muscle relief patches instead of francs.
‘THIS SHOW WAS SO GOOD BUT AKRAM’S DANCERS R U OK,’ I half jokingly posted on my work instagram’s stories.
When I opened my instagram the next morning, I was surprised to see a similar joking not joking reply from one of the dancers in the show: ‘thanks for coming! No we are not ok but the physio is coming tomorrow.’1
Dance is tiring. Dance is hard. Like really fucking hard. The physicality is brutal, the industry is unkind, and you’d probably make not that much less (or maybe even more) working at Starbucks.
So more often than not, dancers who reach and stay in the professional echelons are people who, well …they like their art, but they also really kinda like pain.
‘I’m actually looking forward to it,’ a dancer at the English National Ballet once said to me when the subject of their infamously gruelling, last-man-standing coliseum season came up. ‘It will be my first coli season and it feels like a rite of passage.’
Dancers are the front face of any company, the stars of any show but let’s be real – they are also the lowest common denominators. They are bodies that must dutifully be transformed into whatever a choreographer envisions.
And in a way, it feels choreography that is so consistently brutal, programs designed to be unrelentlessly demanding take advantage of that. Why, for instance, have a ballet triple bill that requires dancers to move between extremities of technique and style – classical to contemporary to neoclassical, and that is so taxing that dancers cannot feel their legs by the end.
(A doctor for the Paris Opera Ballet once told me. ‘Injuries always go up when the dancers have to transition from classical to contemporary’)
“The Akram is amazing and you should watch it,” I texted a friend who danced in one of his full length works. ”But also how on earth are they dancing like this every show?”
“That’s Akram,” she replied. “I think he kind of expects everyone to dance like him. Dancers…they either like him or they don’t.”
(“I like him, he’s great, people just don’t get him,” said a friend who became a répétiteur for him.
“I hate him and I never want to work with him again,” said another.)
It’s a strange thing, to feel like you have to keep propagating the brutality of the experiences that you went through. I’ve heard of artistic directors who expect dancers to perform through injury – they did it so you have to as well.
Dance is physical. It is once again, louder for the back rows, really fucking hard.
I think any dancer accepts that they will, at multiple points in their career, have to push their body to the limits as a condition of their job. Art doesn’t advance without the exploration of where the boundaries are, and how to break them. But that break doesn’t always have to be physical.
If this was a very limited series of performances, go ahead, there’s room to push a little. But in 15 shows in 18 days on the first leg of a tour, maybe we should rethink that.
“That’s why I loved working with Crystal Pite,” someone once told me. “She is always considerate of her dancers.”
To be fair, not all of Akram’s pieces are this insane.
“All we do in the second act is bourree, it’s so boring.” a ballerina once said about the second act of his Giselle.
“Yeah I get it, but it works.” I told her (I watched it 4 times and never once felt bored.)
Because it is though, a type of failure on the part of a choreographer or director if they have to consistently rely on bigness,the sensational, and the brutalizing of bodies for a work to be impactful.
Thoughtfulness and restraint can create compelling, creative and sometimes even more boundary-pushing work.
- I have over 60,000 followers on my work instagram – this is not a flex it’s just to explain why Akram’s dancers saw the story and replied me they do not randomly go around scouring instagram to see if anyone saw their shows. ↩︎
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