“An elegant and urgent response to the current political climate on immigration”
First premiered in January 2025 amid the sandstone canyons of AIUIa, Saudi Arabia as an outdoor, immersive site-specific performance commissioned by the Royal Commission for AlUla,Thikra: A Night of Rememberingis Akram Khan’s latest work in collaboration with Saudi visual artist Manal AIDowayan, now reimagined as an indoor performance at Sadler’s Wells.
The title derives from the Arabic word thikra, which means memory or recollection. The performance unfolds as a mysterious, pagan-like ritual tribute to ancestors. According to Khan and AIDowayan, the performance is largely drawn on a variety of mythology, but it does not fixate on any specific narrative or its symbolic connotations.
Instead, the narrative framework seems quite loose. A matriarch (Azusa Seyama Prioville), together with two sisters (Nikita Goile and Samatha Hines), leads their tribe to summon their ancestors. A girl in white (Ching-Ying Chien), neither specified as a sacrifice or the summoned spirit, occupies the central stage. Alongside an ensemble of eight, the four entwine and twist their bodies around one another, crawling, dragging, struggling, spinning, lingering.
The loud music and rhythmic beats, composed by Aditya Prakash (with sound design by Gareth Fry), interweaves music elements mainly from Arabia and South Asia, framed by ritualistic chants at its beginning and end that evokes the style of medieval Eastern European choir. Such intensity of sound, rhythm and physicality may remind you of Hofesh Shechter’s Theatre of Dreams at some certain point, but here the rawness is even more visceral. Their bodies are charged with anger, despise, disgust, rage, fury, despair and resentment. It is of no easy piece.
AIUIa, the ancient city from which the performance draws inspiration, is on the spice incense route that linked India, Arabia and Europe. In other words, the “ancestors” being summoned are those ancient inhabitants who once moved freely across South-Asian subcontinent and the Eurasia continent. As Khan comments, “I feel the urge to unearth the many cultures that have passed through here”, immigration is never something new. To be nomadic could be romantic and heroic, but today, in current political and cultural climate, it is shadowed by suspicion, hostility and even hatred.
In one moment, a massive caterpillar-like rock emerges onstage, later dragged away by Chien. I can’t help but wonder, are the haters the only ones to blame? The immigrants, refusing to embrace any new possibilities – are they, like these caterpillars, spinning their own cocoons and curling up within a shell full of cultural stereotypes and rigid identities, rejecting any cultural collision? When difference is no longer celebrated, what has been lost through the passage of time, and what must now be summoned, is not the ancestors themselves, but the lost knowledge, and their nomadic ways of living.