You are about to leave the Akram Khan Company website to experience the creation of XENOS on our microsite.
For the best experience, we recommend that you visit the microsite on a desktop with your sound on and view it in full screen.
“I have awakened to a new way of dancing. And that is to dance my ideas through the bodies of others, including older dancers, who carry their histories and complex emotional experiences within them. But what remains unchanged is my passion for exploring old and new myths in the context of our times.”
– Akram Khan
Stirring classical and contemporary, Akram explores our oldest rituals in the midst of our ever-changing planet. Outwitting the Devil brings together a superb ensemble of six international artists sharing great differences in their practice: Mythili Prakash or Pallavi Anand, Luke Jessop, Jasper Narvaez, James Vu Anh Pham or Louis T. Partridge, Elpida Skourou and François Testory.
Inspired by the newly discovered fragment of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world’s earliest surviving great works of literature, Akram’s work is a concentrated epic about ritual and remembering. In a landscape of broken tablets and fallen idols, its six characters trade their remaining wealth and stories, seeking to make whole the fragments of ancient knowledge lost and forgotten over time.
To weave the narrative and design of this piece, Akram invited his close collaborators: dramaturg Ruth Little, composer Vincenzo Lamagna, rehearsal director Mavin Khoo, costume designer Kimie Nakano, writer Jordan Tannahill, lighting designer Aideen Malone and visual designer Tom Scutt. Outwitting the Devil invites us all to the table where life, death and our half-remembered myths are the bread we break together.
At this year’s National Dance Awards, Company dancer James Vu Anh Pham won the Outstanding Male Modern Performance award for his performance in the work.