ABSTRACT
This chapter offers with Akram Khan, the critically renowned British-Bangladeshi dancer-choreographer, aims to examine this very gap in order to expose the psycho-physical negotiations that British South Asian dancers have to undertake when working within the contemporary British dance industry and its ubiquitous touch-driven partnering aesthetic, thereby foregoing their own complex and culturally specific relationship to touch and touching. It explores the politics of touch that permeate the experience of both movement training and choreographic practices of racialised and culturally Othered bodies within the contemporary British dance industry. The chapter focuses on the ubiquitous presence of contact improvisation and partnering within this choreographic landscape, interrogating it as a colonising language vis-à-vis racialised bodies. It also explores how his own socio-cultural relationship to touch as a British-Bangladeshi Muslim man entered into tensions with his contemporary movement training, and how these tensions continue to inform the ethics of his choreographic choices with multiracial and multicultural dancers.
