i'm stephen sackur. in every culture on earth, dance is a physical, joyfulform of expression and communication. it is, in a way, the world's most basic common language. my guest today epitomises the ability of dance to cross borders of time and space. akram khan is british by birth, bangladeshi by family heritage and now globally renowned as one of the great contemporary dancers and choreographers. the performances weave together influences from east and west, past and present. how would he define his dance? akram khan, welcome to hardtalk. thank you, welcome. seems to me so many of the great professional dancers have been raised in one very strict discipline, one cultural tradition. that isn't quite true of you, is it? er, no. iwas... you know, i was born and brought up in london so already i was exposed to many, many different cultural activities from very different backgrounds, but my mother wanted me to learn something from her roots, and not just language, because language was very crucial to her because of the independence of bangladesh. the movement originally started for the war, to fight between east pakistan and... so the bengali identity, bangladeshi identity was hugely important. did you learn bengali, the language? idid. she refused to speak to me in english because she knew i'd learn english in school, because i was born and brought up here. so she wanted me to be in touch with her language, but also her culture, something that was classical and close to her culture. classical indian dancing, the right thing, so that's what she kind of forced me, pushed me into. this would be the kathak tradition. kathak, exactly, north indian classical dance. so, as a kid, you were living in south london, your dad running a restaurant, but were you sort of told that you would be going to dance lessons, kathak traditional dance lessons? yeah, it was more of a bribe. if i went, then i would get something at the end of it. because i was... of course, when you are exposed to so many different things — i was heavily into michael jackson, i loved... how did your mother feel about that? she was all right. she was ok. is it true that you won a prize at school for the best version of thriller, the michael jackson routine? yeah, it was two things. it was michaeljackson, i did a routine, and five star, which is a group in that period that i used to love. they used to be inspired by michaeljackson. so, yeah, i won something, a competition. i don't know if we are talking ten, 11 years old, but you are becoming a sort of fusion, in a way, of different influences. i wonder whether, as you progressed through adolescence and you became very keen on different forms of dancing, whether there was a tension in you about which direction to go, to follow? yes, there was, but the tension comes from my community and social construct of my parents' community, because academics was very important for them. you know, they were recently independent as a country, they felt education was the way forward and dance was a hobby. up to this day, my community are great and wonderful and supportive, but i do get the occasional, "what do you do as a realjob?" yes! and that's ok. obviously your parents are from a muslim tradition. yes. was that in any way relevant? was there any religious impulse to go in one particular traditional direction rather than to embrace michaeljackson, for example? no. my mother was really open. she is an extremely open... she studied literature — bengali literature, but she also studied mythology, greek mythology, hindu mythology. she was fascinated by stories, narratives, and she kind of coached me into it. she kind of guided me into it from a young age. many people around the world will probably be familiar with the billy elliott story of a kid from a northern industrial town, a mining sort of town, who is a brilliant natural dancer and then has to struggle with himself and his family and his community about getting to the right sort of dance school to explore his passion. yeah. that isn't quite what you're telling me. it wasn't that sort of having to escape. no. first of all, i don't... i'm trying to be very honest. i'm not naturally talented. what i am... i have one talent, and that is, when i get obsessed with something, i commit to it in a very extreme way. i can go into my parents' garage, which i did, at the... just after gcses, i was lost for a while, and i went into my parents' garage and they thought i was at college. so, for a year, i was hiding out in my dad's garage. doing what? training. in indian classical dance. and that's my talent. i did like ten hours a day, from morning... entirely in secret, private, just for yourself? yeah, that was my form of escape. ijust wanted to get really good at it. i became obsessed by it. i was fascinated by kathak, north indian classical dance. and yet, you know, if we fast forward a little bit to get to where your career begins to take off, you actually entered a very different environment. you went to one of the uk's top contemporary dance schools and then you started getting work, which was beginning to make your name, not in the street kathak tradition, but actually finding your own dance language, which combines some eastern traditional expression with a lot of very contemporary, edgy, current western dance. yeah. i call it confusion. people used to call their work fusion, but i prefer to call it confusion, because really my body was very confused at the time. i think, out of that confusion, you start to search for clarity, for your voice. your identity. yeah. which you're exploring actually through dance. yeah. but it could have been writing or music or whatever. but, for you, you were very much sort of autobiographical, in a way. a lot of my work's autobiographical, yeah. i like to touch... there's a lot of questions i would like to explore that went through my childhood. as i said, michaeljackson wasn't the only person. i loved charlie chaplin, i loved fred astaire. buster keaton, muhammad ali, bruce lee — all these people were my superheroes. you brought ali with you. yeah, i thought hardtalk, muhammad ali... it's a great cue, actually, because we want to show everybody a little bit of your dance, some of the stuff you've done. perhaps your most autobiographical work was desh, which took you in a way back to bangladesh. let's just enjoy 30 seconds or so of this. for me, it's fascinating on so many levels. here you are, the movement i love. it's so expressive. but also there's a longing in it and a relationship between you and bangladesh — as represented, i guess, by the nature there. i'm trying to figure out whether it's actually, in a sense, sad or whether it's a very positive thing. i think it's a bit of both. ithink, you know, really the story's about my father, in a way. i start the show off hammering this kind of grave... so, you know, when i told my father, "look, the show is kind of about you and me", he was excited. but i said, "hold on, i have to tell you something. "you're dead at the beginning of the show." he says, "you've killed me off already? "i'm not even dead in real life!" so he was kind of taken aback by that. but it's very much about how my father, or how fathers from a different culture, when they're in a different environment, they start to question what they want their children, which direction they want them to be. he kept on saying to me when i was a teenager... you know, i was imitating a lot of michaeljackson and bruce lee and all these people who were my superheroes. he kind of said, "i want you to be more bangladeshi." i still to this day don't know what that means. it was really... something in his own mind that he believed in. so partly exploring your relationship with him, but in terms of your own relationship with the culture that you grew up in, london and then the dance world in the west, but also very regularly visiting bangladesh, did you feel and do you feel like an outsider actually in both cultures and countries? yes, i do. i neverfelt an outsider in britain as much as when brexit happened. but, in bangladesh, i always feel an outsider. i mean, ifeel more british when i'm in bangladesh. and ifeel more bangladeshi when i'm in britain. so, for me, it's about no borders, really. a home is, for me, where family is and where they feel most safe, really. i'm interested that you say you never felt more of outsider in the uk then you do today. because, from reading things you've said in the past, there were difficult experiences when you were a kid. your father's restaurant sometimes was visited by pretty obnoxious, racist people. yeah, we went through a really bad period. i think many people from the bangladeshi community and others would say, actually, there's less overt racism today than there was back then, 30, a0 years ago. i wonder why you feel more of an outsider now. er... it's changing now, with brexit. i think things are changing. ithink... i think racism has an open door now somehow, a bigger voice — a sense of creating walls with other cultures, you know, xenophobia, fear of the other, fear of the foreigner. for me, a lot of my work explores that. you weave that into the stuff you're doing. because that's my reality. i explore things that have happened to me or that are surrounding me. coming back to the point about mash—up and fusion, i want to bring in another clip, because itjust seems so relevant to what you're saying right now. you took a classical ballet, giselle, worked with the english national ballet and you gave it a contemporary twist. when you talk about walls and immigrants, you reimagined a love story taking place with giselle, who is actually a garment worker, a very poor girl. let's just look at the imagery that comes from your giselle. again, stunning images, very different from the clip from desh that we saw earlier. what was it like working with the english national ballet, and with tamara rojo, who is one of the great contemporary dancers? it was extraordinary. but particularly working with the english national ballet. i mean, i've not worked with other ballet companies, and english national ballet, i was always apprehensive of working with a ballet company. were they open to you? well, yes. what you were bringing was probably very different from anything they'd worked with before. that's why i was apprehensive, if they were going to be open, and they were extraordinarily generous and really daring. i mean, they really supported the entire process, and kudos to tamara and the whole team. they're extraordinary. you know, classical repertoire has heritage. it has a lot of weight. so i could feel the weight. and giselle's very loved. you know, it's a very loved piece and it's an extraordinary piece of work so, to take it and then have the audacity to kind of... you didn't dance in that, did you? no, i wish i could do ballet. i was going to say, you said very modestly at the beginning of this interview, "you know what, the secret is i'm not very talented." i don't think anybody watching this necessarily is going to believe that, but could you have been? can you imagine, now that you are so experienced in the world of dance, if you'd gone in a different direction, could you have been a classical ballet dancer? er... i don't think so. i used to love nureyev and baryshnikov. they were also one of my heroes. both of them were extraordinary ballet dancers, and i always dreamt of being like them. what do you think you don't have? personally, i don't have the body for it. i mean, i don't have the flexibility. but it depends because maybe, as a child, perhaps if i had started early enough... but nureyev started much later, but still, i mean, he's just exquisite. so you use your body in a very different way. absolutely. i'm interested in that. i'd like you to tell me a little bit about how, the mechanics of how you tell stories with your body. what are the great gifts that you need? what kind of flexibility and what kind of expression can you get out of your body? for me, flexibility, the flexibility that i deal with is an illusion. i work with the illusion of flexibility. i don't truly have an immense range at all physically, but i'm fast. that's one thing i've always done. i think — this is my logic — because of my training in kathak, because you have to wear these very heavy bells around your ankles and you train for hours, so it's like having weights around your ankles. the moment you take them off, you're like speedy gonzales. you're superfast. so i think... and also fear, of revealing that i'm not flexible. so i'd rather do things very fast so things will become a blur, so you'll be like, "is he flexible? "i didn't quite catch that." and so, in a way, my stylistic, er, development came out of the necessity of hiding what i was not good at. well, when you tell me about the things you took from your kathak tradition, it also reminds me that, on this journey of yours through different dance traditions and fusing things together, you have in recent years gone quite regularly to india and, i guess, to bangladesh as well to perform and put on some of the shows. i know there's been a sort of... there was for a while resistance to you. people felt you'd betrayed the tradition. yeah. but that seems to have changed, because now you get huge acclaim and audiences in india. are they now more open—minded, do you think? i think always the traditionalists will be a little bit negative or a little bit difficult with absorbing what i do, or accepting what i do, but it has changed. it has got a lot better, i have to say. i have to say, the younger generation are amazing. they've really embraced it. in india, it's so exciting. i love performing in india and bangladesh, too. dance strikes me, and i guess i said it in the introduction, as such a sort of elemental art form because, in the end, you're communicating through your body. and i can see that one of the implications of that is that, as you age and as your body becomes perhaps less powerful, less potent, it affects your ability to tell the stories and to express in the way that you want to. er, i would say, technically, yes. ithink... you know, yeah, it depends if you are looking at it from a western perspective or... explain. it depends also on the dance form. in kathak, the real masters, when they are at their peak is from a0 onwards. everything else before that is preparation. training. yeah. i think, in western classical dance form, it's much earlier. because it's not just about having strength. it's about knowing how to use that strength in a poetic way and a deeper way. for me, the older i become, the less... of course, i have to abandon the reality that my body cannot do some of the things that i'd love to do when i was 30 but then i find other things and ifind other ways to express that same movement, get it across in a different way. you do less dancing now... i do more training. training, and a lot of... i do more training now. do you? you mean for yourself? yes. physical training? yes, i have to. right. so you have to actually train more... even more than i did before. the reason i think it's important, when discussing dance, to get into the physicality of it is because it is so important. you've said, and i think there were three of you leading figures in contemporary dance in the uk who wrote a letter not long ago, an open letter, saying that, as far as you were concerned, the new generation of young contemporary dancers in the uk were not disciplined enough, not hungry enough, not training hard enough to be the very best, and that a lot of the best young dancers you could see and that you wanted to work with in your own company were actually coming from overseas. yeah, we were talking more specifically about the training, perhaps selfishly, geared towards our companies' work, so i always needed very strong technical dancers and i felt at that time the dancers that i was seeing coming out of colleges were not geared towards the kind of dancers i was looking for, and perhaps the same for the other two choreographers. so it's not a basic hunger thing? you're not saying that young people today, with so many different forms of entertainment and art and culture around them, are not dedicating themselves to dance in the way that you have to to be the very top? i think, in any form, if you really want to have a profound impact on it, you have to become obsessed by it. and i do believe deep down that, whatever technique it is, it has to imprison you. you have to learn it so much, you have to learn about it so much, you have to do it so much that, eventually, that imprisonment, you find freedom out of that imprisonment. so you find freedom out of that form that you've been trying to perfect. but it means you go through an awful lot of pain on the way. yeah, pain, of course, but everything is pain. everything is hard work. if you want to be good at anything, you have to work hard. you have to sacrifice stuff. and, if you feel it's a sacrifice, that already a problem. mmm. if you consider it, for you to be where you are, you've had put in many hours of work. you have to do it. you had to go through it. what now then for you? because you do an awful lot around the world. i'm just going to make other people go through it now. i'm done going through the pain. you mean you are seriously contemplating quitting being an active dancer in your own shows altogether? i think i'm slowly winding down — yeah, for sure. i don't want to tour so heavily. you know... maybe a few more years and then i may do small roles, because i love to dance anyway, but i love to dance for my children. i love to dance in the living room. i love... these days, the training part is the bit that i don't like anymore. i used to love it, but it hurts so much. it's like running. when you run at 20, it's different to when you run at 30, go for a jog. the spring changes, how you run changes. when you run at 40, it's different to the way you run at 30. you feel it. and so i feel a huge difference to what i felt at 20 and 30. i enjoy the performance part of it but not the training part of it. i just wonder whether you're going to be happy when you have quit dancing professionally, because you said sometimes you feel overwhelmed with the amount of stuff, politics, administration that comes with running a company and doing all the stuff that means that you can get your shows around the world, but not actually involving you dancing on the stage. if that becomes your life, will you find that deeply frustrating? i think i will, but i will still keep dancing in the privacy of my own space, i think. i love to explore the ideas that i cannot do on my own body in other people's bodies, like working with english national ballet. their extraordinary ability, the facility that they have and the ability, pushes the language further. they come already with a very solid training of ballet, so this kind of connection between what i do and the ballet body was fascinating for me. i was fascinated by the point shoes and what women can do on point. it's just extraordinary. i've seen it before but, until you work with them directly, you truly, really... you really respect it, because it's an extraordinary technique, and what it did was it transformed the material that i usually create on my body or my dancers. to end, any thoughts on the next big theme that you might take on? you've talked a lot about immigration and the walls that people build between cultures. what's the big theme that you might tackle next? definitely the body, but i'm interested in the mythological body and the technological future body. robots, artificial intelligence? absolutely, yeah. i look forward to seeing it. thank you. akram khan, it's been a pleasure having you on hardtalk. thank you very much indeed. thank you very much. morning. it was a fairly miserable weekend, wasn't it? cold and bleak for many of us so monday was a better day. the exception was the far north—east, still rather disappointingly cool. across aberdeen, only five degrees and a lot of cloud. you can see on a satellite picture from monday, where the cloud is that for scotland. there was a decent sunshine elsewhere. it was windy but the sunshine hopefully compensated. we had a high of 13 degrees near exeter. there is some cloud and rain down into the south—west. a weather front approaching into cornwall over the next few hours. staying quite windy with hill fog through the higher ground of wales and north—west england. a chilly start for many of us with the exception in the south—west. first thing on tuesday, it will be cloud and outbreaks of rain through cornwall and eventually netting into parts of devon. a little bit of cloud into somerset and wales but elsewhere at cold start with some spells of sunshine. further north—west egg and, maybe sunny and a bit of patchy frost in sheltered areas of scotland but not a bad start of the day. as we go on through the day, we will continue to see sunshine and temperatures will be a degree also up on whether they were on monday. the exception is in the south—west whether cloud will begin to gather and push up through the midlands and into wales. eventually into northern ireland. it will bring the odd spot of rain. temperatures still be sent. highs hopefully six or seven into scotland. the weather front will move out of the way and then we have a series of fronts out to the west which produce are messy picture for wednesday. there will be some rain with these frontal systems but it will be hit and miss as they drift up from the south. they will be outbreaks of cloudy rain. it will be cloudy but mild and less windy than we have seen this week. the best of the brightness into the far north and east. eight or nine degrees by the rest of the week. once we areas of low pressure at the way, things are likely to quieten down as we go to the end of the week. the isobars will open up and the winds will fall lighter. that means it will be dry and mild but early morning mist and fog will be a problem. that will slowly lift and any rain we get will be light and patchy. all in all, not a bad end to the week. hello everyone. i'm rico hizon in singapore. our top stories: the un security council unanimously condemns north korea's latest missile test. america says it's time not for words, but actions. at least 32 people are killed after a tour bus crashes in the taiwanese capital, taipei. i'm lebo diseko in london. as inspections continue at a damaged dam in california, thousands of people who were evacuated want to know when they can return home. and we meet the keen knitter whose sweaters mirror the landmarks he visits.