Amina Khayyam in Macbeth: Stage of Blood, a Watermans/International Arts production  Dir : Lokendra Arambam (1997)
 

Swirling to the beats of tabla with her eyes closed, Amina Khayyam performs her Kathak in a trance-like state, drawing inspiration from shamanistic tribal practices – which she first encountered in the early years of her training during the Waterman’s production of Macbeth: Stage of Blood on the River Thames, by the eminent Manipur director Lokendra Arambam. That experience has had a lasting impact on how she creates her work, letting emotion lead her kathak.

Amina’s choreography in the upcoming large scale production Ghost Ships will use this trademark approach to explore the trauma of famines that were systematically caused by the British Empire in India.

Amina recalls that first encounter with Shamanism, “At that time I remember, Lokendra was one of the top theatre directors in India. When his company came to London, they also incorporated British performers in the production and that’s how I came on board. It was two weeks of intense workshopping, where we explored Shamanism and the practices associated with it, especially Thang-Ta, which is one of the oldest Martial Art forms in India practiced in the Manipur area.” “We were in the river Thames, quite literally with water up to our hips, practicing Thang-Ta, moving in harmony of the tide of the Thames exploring the space in our bodies, it was quite a unique experience.”

The cast were encouraged to explore feelings, emotions, memories and traumas that our bodies store, invoking the trance-like state. She recalls the experience as being intense and deeply felt. “When I came back, I recall my teacher saying, ‘something has changed about your dance."

Shamanism is a religious or spiritual practice that involves a practitioner called the shaman connecting with the spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance.

Amina adds, “It has greatly influenced the kind of work I create, where I look at the emotion before looking at the movement. As our work explores stories and characters with difficult experiences, we encourage dancers to approach movement from an emotional perspective. With the pressure of short rehearsal periods we do not get enough time to go through the ideal process, yet it’s important we connect to the emotional state of the characters before creating the movement – posing the question – ‘how does that emotion make you move?'"

The shaman approach is evident in Amina’s other work, most recently in ‘Bird’, the Lustrum Award-winning production which focuses on the aftermath of women leaving their abusive partners. Amina’s character is a mother who has had to leave her children behind to get away from domestic abuse. It is from a real lived experience. While on one hand, she is now free, on the other, she must face the trauma of leaving her child behind. “Every time I performed that character, I found something new within her, new layers and new deeper emotions to her story."

In Ghost Ships, AKDC’s dancers will be exploring the famines in colonial India, particularly the harrowing imagery from the Bengal famine of 1943.

Amina reveals, “I wondered how someone can see a whole city in this state and just walk past dying children as if it was normal. This normalisation of suffering is what I want to look at and what it felt like to be hungry, destitute and treated without empathy from the onlooker. I’m not sure if I’ll find the answers but I will be posing these questions.”

Ghost Ships will be staged at The Historic Dockyard Chatham from Wednesday 25 to Saturday 28 September 2024, commemorating 40 years since the former Royal Dockyard’s closure.