WITH BEAMING brown eyes, stylishly sculpted facial fuzz and perfect posture, the petite man coming towards me doesn't walk, he glides on to the balcony of the Arts Centre cafe. Pulling out a plastic chair and settling into it like a yogi, he looks like a dance guru. Then he places a pack of cigarettes on the table. 'Ninety-five per cent of British dancers smoke,' he says apologetically. 'It's one bad habit we have.'
Akram Khan is being heralded as an emerging master of modern choreography. The 28-year-old is pushing the boundaries of dance with his contemporary take on kathak, a 500-year-old Indian dance tradition.
He is soaking up the sun, relaxed, radiant and in the midst of a five-month break from exhaustive touring. For once he has time to sit back and reflect. 'When it's a roller coaster you don't have time to reflect or appreciate,' he says. 'It's like when you drop a stone in water and create ripples, except it felt like we were dropping a meteor, creating waves.'
Dressed in simple white tunics and versed in moves that are both ancient and cutting-edge modern, Khan and his dancers juxtapose new forms with the ancient Indian traditions in their shows. The result is a new style of movement that has delighted the dance world.
'Kathak Contemporary is what we call it, but actually I'm not sure what it is,' says Khan. 'It's a new language of movement and it's things I have absorbed through childhood, not just the classical but Michael Jackson, hip-hop.'
Khan was born in London in 1974 to parents from Bangladesh. 'I was too hyperactive as a child,' he says, sipping his English breakfast tea and smiling. 'I needed to be occupied.'