Planethalder: Ma

As a small child in Bangladesh, she was passionate about ancient Kathak dancing, but had to practice in secret because her strict Muslim father did not approve. So when she moved to London, she was determined her son would not be so deprived.

The son's natural inclination was to throw himself around to Michael Jackson songs, but Ma persevered and encouraged him to study classical Indian dance with the great dancer and teacher Sri Pratap Pawar. As a small boy visiting his mother's homeland, he would hang upside down from trees in the hope that his thoughts would tumble out of his head and into the ground, whence answers would grow.

Later, under pressure from the English Bengali community to go to university, the son did a degree in contemporary dance and discovered modern choreographers DV8, Pina Bausch and Jiri Kylian. Now 30, Akram Kahn is also inspired by the films of Ang Lee, Wong Kar-Wai and Quentin Tarantino.

In Akram Khan's second and current dance production, both classical Indian and contemporary western dance and music share the stage. "Ma" was born out of Khan's readings of Arundhati Roy's essays on the displacement of Indian farmers by big dam-building programmes. The essays made him reflect on the complex relationships farmers have with a "mother earth" that is both nurturing and unforgiving.

The production tonight at the Queen Elizabeth Hall was a truly holistic experience, merging theatre, music and dance into a maelstrom: flailing limbs, Kathak chanting, thumping tabla, wailing cello, Sufi song, combat rolls, searing green and white light, soothing amber light, caressing wordscapes, rolling heads, suspended bodies, bare feet skittering across the stage, and flashes of pure silence.

And yet the confusion was perfectly contained within the ek-do-tin-one-two-three geometrical precision of the Kathak dance and chant, which Khan described after the performance in a question-and-answer session as "clarity within chaos".

An intensely visceral night.

Related links:

+ "Everything in Indian music works mathematically and is very logical. Once that's understood, the music can be appreciated in a different way, and you can start playing around with the rules. There's a lot of improvisation, and the complex patterns we work from are more simple than they look." Akram Khan speaking to Culture Kiosque.

+ "Ma is the Hindu word for earth and it's into this work that Khan as choreographer unloads his most pressing questions. While his programme notes tell us the work is about issues of land, kinship and belonging, Khan is also investigating what happens when Indian and western styles of storytelling and performance share the stage." The Guardian review of Ma.

Other links today:

+ "Five trucks converge on the house across the street from my sister. The neighbors were deep frying a turkey in the backyard and something went wrong, the grease caught fire and flames shot up to the second floor with a roar like a jet engine. Boiling hot grease went flying everywhere. The turkey, I was told, exploded. A propane tank that held the fuel to heat the grease was a danger. A fireman asked the owner if he had a garden hose (but there was a hydrant on the corner!). He aimed it at the grease, which more or less went nuts, splattering everywhere, but the flames were out." David Bryne's Thanksgiving.

+ 100 things to do before you die, compiled by scientists, is a little book that's out just in time for Christmas: