Echoes, CUT, & Constellations | Aakash Odedra Company

Experience a mesmerizing evening of contemporary dance featuring three distinct solos performed by Aakash Odedra as part of Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Lates.

Echoes, Constellations, & CUT features three solo pieces choreographed by acclaimed artists Aditi Mangaldas, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, and Russell Maliphant. Each work explores different processes and aesthetics using Aakash’s traditional background in kathak and bharatanatyam to create a distinct flavor of contemporary dance. The unprecedented pairing of world-renowned contemporary choreographers and one of the most talented British South Asian dancers of his generation builds on Aakash’s mesmerizing agility and the maturity gained from a decade of developing his craft.

Discover more about Aakash Odedra here

The evening’s programme includes:

Echoes

Choreographed by Aditi Mangaldas and performed by Aakash Odedra

The resonance of the bells awakens us to the now. A breath and senses awakens. LIFE awakens me. Bells have been a constant companion of every Indian classical dancer. They have aged with one, in a way they have resonated with one’s life through the process of dance. Should these bells just be a part of a given tradition? Become a ritual and thus in a way be dead? Can they not be alive in the present? The bells in Echoes become a metaphor of resonance, of freedom, of awakening.

CUT

Choreographed by Russell Maliphant and performed by Aakash Odedra

Russell Maliphant created CUT using elements and dynamics that were familiar to Aakash from his background in kathak and bharatnatyam. He shapes that into a world where lights cut and highlight the movement, creating an industrial, contained world that expresses its own logic of flow and form. Russell worked alongside the lighting designer Michael Hulls and composer Andy Cowton, with whom he has a long creative history. CUT is the result of this collaboration.

Constellations

Choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and performed by Aakash Odedra

Lighting & thunder. Light & sound. The illusions of distance and nearness they convey in a sky that deceptively appears as a constant. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui has been fascinated by the different images these convey. He seeks to highlight different patterns of sound and different sources of light that come together to create a constellation, a system where things are kept suspended and in movement by each other’s gravitational fields & contending forces. The movements follow the flow of light and sound, emanating from darkness, and their return to that state. All this with and through Aakash as the locus, the astral body generates its own rhythms and luminosity.

Presented collaboration with Louvre Abu Dhabi and UK-UAE Cultural Professionals Connect.

UK-UAE Cultural Professionals Connect is a grant programme funded by the FCDO and delivered in partnership with the British Council in UAE to foster international mobility, networking and creative exchanges through arts and culture.