Akram Khan's Chotto Desh Review ★★★★★

Dance, words, animation, an atmospheric soundscape and especially composed music come together in Chotto Desh to create an engrossing, family-friendly dance-theatre work that tells the story of a young man whose wish to become a dancer goes against his immigrant father’s determination that he should have a sensible job like his own, a chef.

Adapted by Sue Buckmaster from Akram Khan’s Oliver Award-winning autobiographical piece Desh in 2015, it now returns to the stage at the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the Southbank’s Imagine Children’s Festival.

Like its grown up brother Desh, so Chotto Desh, meaning ‘little homeland’, is a solo piece, mesmerisingly performed by Nico Ricchini, who is fluent in all manner of dance, from ballet through contemporary to South Asian Kathak, and acrobatics too, and is also a tremendously expressive actor. All the text is in recorded voice over, to which he gives bodily expression.

The London-born son of a Bangladeshi immigrant father, the boy finds yearly visits to his father’s homeland deeply confusing.To an overwhelming soundtrack of urban noise and traffic, he’s seen dodging all manner of oncoming vehicles, and representing the beggars, traffic policemen and yogis that dot the streets of urban Bangladesh.

Next thing you know, with just three lines drawing a face on his shaved head which he points at the audience while crouching, he becomes his own father, a short but forceful man, so very proud of his talent as a chef.

Akram Khan Company, Chotto Desh. Photo: Pete Woodhead
Engaging as Ricchini’s stage performance is, Chotto Desh really comes alive in its middle section, where Tim Yip’s visual design combines with YeastCulture’s visual animation in dazzling black and white projections that tell a folk story of a boy who goes into the forest to steal honey from a beehive. A river undulates in the foreground, as the boy travels in a small boat and the trees become denser. Animals emerge: birds and butterflies fly across, a crocodile opens its jaws, a snake is seen coiled on a tree trunk, as angry bees buzz around their broken hive.

Jocelyn Pook’s musical score adds to the magic.

Chotto Desh is a delightful piece of work, that gently touches on some of the questions that arise in the lives of the children of immigrants: the parents’ yearning for the homeland they were forced to live means little to the children whose homeland is the place where they were born and grow up.

A 50 minutes’ duration, it is perfect for children; and certainly in the show I attended you could sense the concentration and engagement of its young audience.