Last Updated on October 29, 2025
Akram Khan and Manal AlDowayan Explore Ancient Myth
3.0 out of 5.0 starsThikra: Night of Remembering marks a celebration and a farewell. Akram Khan Company is celebrating its 25th anniversary, but this will be its final work before it winds up. Its founder, Akram Khan, is a restless spirit who has explored many stories, cultures and myths over a long career as a dancer and choreographer. He has also developed his own, unique choreographic language, rooted in the South Asian dance forms of kathak, in which he was trained, and bharatanatyam, blended with Western contemporary dance.
For the next stage in his career, Khan needs the freedom to create work unmoored from a steady company, and, in particular, international, site-specific work, such as Thikra: Night of Remembering, which has reached Sadler’s Wells as part of an extensive tour, and which Khan sees as a new beginning.
Collaboration has always been one of the hallmarks of Khan’s creativity. He has created work with sculptor Anish Kapoor, musician Nitin Sawhney, actress Juliette Binoche, dancer Sylvie Guillem, and most memorably, perhaps, English National Ballet, for which he adapted one of the sacred monsters of Romantic ballet, Giselle, into a raw, powerful contemporary work.
For Thikra: Night of Remembering, Akram Khan came together with the Saudi visual artist Manal AIDowayan to create a work set in the desert of Saudi Arabia, on the site of the ancient oasis of AIUla.
The myths surrounding AIUla are powerful, and you can see how Khan would be totally receptive to Manal AIDowayan’s avowed passion for the place. The city was on the Silk Route from China and the frankincense route from Yemen, and although the focus of ancestral myth, not much is known about its actual history. In other words, AIUla offers an enticing invitation to the imagination.
With Thikra: Night of Remembering, Akram Khan and Manal AIDowayan set about exploring a ritual of memory in a piece that is, in Khan’s own words, “10% history, 90% imagination”.
This work premiered in January 2025, and it must have been a unique and extraordinary experience to see it in the desert, with its unhindered natural light and sound, and the wide, empty expanses all around. It has now been refashioned for an indoor theatre setting, and Manal AIDowayan’s scenography is deeply atmospheric, its mysterious look at times enhanced, though occasionally hampered, by Zeinep Kepekli’s dark lighting design.
A rock cave is the background against which the story develops: a Matriarch, whom we first see standing on a raised platform bathed in deep red light, leads the all-female tribe to summon their ancestor spirit from the Knowledge Rock. She is assisted by two sisters.
The Ancestor returns to the tribe for one night of exchange, the Night of Remembering, portrayed in Thikra.
The two central figures of Matriarch and Ancestor are danced respectively by Azusa Seyama Prioville, of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch (Khan confesses to a long-standing dream to work with dancers from Bausch’s company) and Ching-Ying Chien, who had danced for Khan before.
They lead a cast three-quarters of which have Bharatanatyam training. In fact, much of the choreography draws from Bharatanatyam: it’s grounded, relying on deeply bent knees and swaying torsos and arms.
It also relies a lot on what’s become known as ‘hairography”, obviously going back to a time before The Prophet placed restrictions on women’s hair; but it’s not entirely clear what purpose it serves in the narrative, or what it symbolises.
And so we come to my problem with this piece: the fact that, despite having carefully read the extensive programme notes beforehand, and indeed after the performance, I still have very little idea what was going on.
One of the sisters (Samantha Hines) spent much time scuttling around crab-like, pulling faces and muttering before inflicting great violence on the other sister. Why? Maybe a female version of Cain and Abel? Or is this altogether the wrong mythology?
Equally, there were sequences where the all-female ensemble fell into a kind of trance reminiscent of Dionysus’s frenzied Bacchae; but surely, that, too, is the wrong mythology?
I realise Thikra: Night of Remembering was not meant as a linear narrative, but dramaturg Blue Pieta didn’t really go out of her way to make sense of it, with the result that the more frustrated I felt, the more my distance from the work grew.
Another gripe is Aditya Prakash’s sound design, a collection mostly of noises that didn’t seem to connect with what we were seeing and was amplified to an almost unbearable degree by Sadler’s Wells’ bombastic sound system.
On the plus side, though, Khan’s choreography was never less than engaging, and the company performed with professionalism and flair – those women were always a pleasure to watch.
Akram Khan & Manal AlDowayan, Thikra: Night of Remembering, is at Sadler’s Wells from 28/10 to 1/11
Looking for something different? We recommend La Fille Mal Gardée, currently showing at RBO
Sadler’s Wells Angel
Rosebery Avenue
London EC1R 4TN
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