Torobaka at Esplanade Theatre

Akram Khan and Israel Galván—their names together set the scene. Witness the power, passion, and unrestrained expression in a meeting of two celebrated dance masters that treads the boundary between duet and duel, traditional and the contemporary, hunter and beast.

Collaborating together for the first time, Khan and Galván draw deeply from their roots in Indian kathak and Spanish flamenco, seeking the essence of movement in the body beyond the dance form. This is not an ethnic exchange between traditions nor an exercise in global dance. It is a creation from a shared way of understanding dance that harks back to the origins of voice and of gesture, before they began to produce meaning. Mimesis rather than mimicry.