“Sadler’s Wells Theatre has been my dancing home for the last 16 years I hold our longstanding relationship with Alistair and the staff at Sadler’s with great respect and gratitude.

The past twenty years of AKC have been of an epic undertaking. Together with the AKC producer Farooq Chaudhry and my incredible team, we chose to seek out artists from across the world and gather not just their incredible expertise, but their different insights into the fundamental questions of why we dance and how can we bring certain stories that may have been forgotten, erased, oppressed, or just hiding in the shadows, to the frontline of our rapidly changing global arena.

But the beguiling thing about this very moment, is that I feel the past twenty years has been a journey mostly about finding my voice, (which was lurking in the shadows of my childhood community), and now that the voice is more present in a more global community, it feels so exciting to start using that voice to discover its range into the future.

So, in a sense, I feel like we at the Akram Khan Company, are at a threshold; a doorway between two periods, the past and the future, sort of like the Roman god ‘Janus’, who had a two-faced image, both looking backwards and forwards, representing a time after an end but before a beginning.”
-Akram Khan

“Twenty years on, it still feels like we’re just beginning. It’s exhilarating and beautiful to feel this way.”
– Farooq Chaudhry

As the Company turned 21, we marked the beginning of our third decade of storytelling. From 23 November – 4 December 2021 we presented Carnival of Shadows at Sadler’s Wells, a production curated as part of the programme reflected where, after two decades of learning and collaborating, we had arrived. Carnival of Shadows served as a moment for us to gather with our beloved UK audiences, to reassemble, communally, in the most sacred space to us: the theatre.