‘I don’t want to be a dancer. I want to be an artist.’ Creative Artist Talk with Mavin Khoo
Last week, we had the pleasure of welcoming internationally recognised dance artist, teacher, choreographer and artist scholar, Mavin Khoo, to Upper School to deliver a Creative Artist Talk to our students.
Mavin sat down with friend and Royal Ballet School ballet teacher, Sarah Kundi, to share his unique and inspiring story with our students, and the influential people that shaped him both as a person and an artist along the way.
He discussed the importance of dancing with intention, getting lost in the movement to create depth and to spark an emotional response from the audience. He challenged the dancers to really understand who they are as artists and to never forget their ‘want’ to dance.
Born and raised in Kuala Lumpa, Malaysia, into a non-dancer family, to a Chinese-Malaysian father and Sri Lankan-Malaysian mother, Mavin opened with a vivid memory of when he first discovered dance and the moment he knew that was what he should do for the rest of his life.
My earliest memory was my first dance class at age five. I know that as a child I was moving a lot, so my mum sent me to an Indian classical dance class because that was the only system of training in Malaysia at that point. I remember it was on a Tuesday at 18.00 in a basement studio. I remember walking in and my teacher was dressed in a green sari, and it was the most clear feeling that I had, which was that I wanted to do this every day of my life.
Mavin’s drive and passion for dance was evident from a young age…
When I was ten years, a famous guru came to Malaysia to teach a series of masterclasses. I was the only child amongst a room full of adults. I was wearing a Mickey Mouse watch. The guru taught this one exercise that didn’t stop. You do first speed, second speed, third speed, and then he just kept going without stopping. The class eventually started to stop except me. I was thinking ‘just keep going, keep going.’ Eventually, he stopped and said, ‘everyone wears a watch to see when they will stop, but this child wears a watch to see how long he can go on for.’
Following this, Mavin moved to India to pursue his training in Bharatanatyam intensively under the legendary dance maestro, Padma Shri Adyar K.Lakshman. For the next seven years, he trained in Indian classical dance and studied classical ballet.
Every Tuesday I would go to the British Council in India to read books and watch ballet videos because that was the only access I had to classical ballet. I would go through the books over and over and memorise them, and then I’d watch videos. One Tuesday, I saw a video cassette that said Baryshnikov Live at Wolf Trap. The last piece that he was performing was Don Quixote with Gelsey Kirkland. I started watching him, and halfway through, I just stopped and I kept looking at the ballerina, and I became obsessed as I watched her dance. I kept rewinding and rewinding. It was like something opened in me. I remember thinking, I don’t want to be a dancer. I want to be an artist.
Encouraged by his South Indian teacher, Mavin then accepted a scholarship to attend a ballet school in London, but it was a chance encounter down Bond Street where he met a teacher who was influential in helping him understand his potential and how to harness his uniqueness as a dancer.
The owners of Danceworks invited me to take class for free and here I met one of the most influential teachers, Nancy Kilgore. Nancy gave me one of the most important pieces of advice, ‘young man, you could be a good ballet dancer, but you will be a great Indian dancer.’ That was an amazing piece of advice, because really what she was saying to me was, understand where your lane is and fulfil the potential of that lane. That was important because it allowed me to have clarity and to trust and be convinced that my journey was going to be unconventional. As a dancer, especially when I was young, everything that was unique about me was different. I now understood that that was also my selling point.
Mavin also reflected on the influence of his historian father, and what he learnt from him about history, legacy, and privilege.
He allowed me to dream, and he held my hand and ran with me. I think there’s something about having a father who’s a historian that has a different impact. Because for me, as I’ve grown older and I’ve matured into my identity, but also my dance, I’ve learnt that history is everything. When I dance, the body, the construct, Mavin Khoo, has not been constructed by myself. It’s a construction of so many different voices that form my history, and all those voices together is what makes Mavin Khoo. The legacy by which that you sit in, I think sometimes we don’t realise how far and how deep it goes. I always say at the end of class that the privilege is that we sit in a space where there are those who have danced before us, and there are those who will dance after us. Every time I stand on stage at Sadler’s Wells, I really, genuinely am humbled by the voices of those who have been there before and those who will come after.
Fast forward to today and Mavin is the Creative Associate at Akram Khan Company. The pair first met in 1997 and since then have built a working relationship that has evolved into a brotherhood. On coaching and staging Akram Khan’s critically acclaimed Giselle for English National Ballet, Mavin shared:
It was not just a job. It was amazing. It was honestly like seeing magic happen before your eyes. Everyone was so scared to say that they thought something special was happening in case we jinxed it. After working with Akram on Giselle, I said to him, I need to be with you all the time. So, I left everything and have devoted myself to his work.
Having worked with Mavin while dancing at English National Ballet, Sarah revealed that the main thing she took from working with him was the use of intention and the impact that it provides to deepen the meaning of each gesture.
It’s a question I ask dancers a lot, ‘what do you want to leave your audience with?’ There’s one aspect where you build a character, and that’s what the audience sees. But if you have the capacity to show the humanness of that character, that is something else completely. One of the most difficult things is to make an audience feel something. You can make an audience impressed. But to make 2000 people cry, it’s a whole other different magic.
Mavin emphasised the importance of getting lost in the moment when dancing to connect with a character and the audience.
It’s about not being fearful of falling off or out of something. Trust yourself. Because for me, there’s so much potential in that. Once you’re in that space, and you’re truly experiencing what you’re doing, then you can do no wrong. Surrendering to that incredible place of being right in the moment, somebody releases you into a safe space that you can experience and explore together. It is an amazing feeling. I think it’s a gift to be able to experience that every time you’re going on stage. It’s an honour, and we are so blessed to be able to experience that, and to be lost in worlds that we can’t create in our own mind.
Mavin ended the talk by encouraging students to anchor yourself within the unknown and to never forget their want to dance:
I think a real conviction in not knowing is essential for any artist. It doesn’t make sense for you to want to do something when you know what the result is going to be as an artist. The joy is not to know. The joy is to discover what happens, which means that you commit to a particular space of the unknown where you’re not going to feel you’re the best. You’re not going to feel you’re on top of it. You’re going to feel very vulnerable in identifying and navigating the space of the unknown. I think for me, what has been the biggest gift when I look back at the teachers I had and the guru I had, is that now at nearly 50 years, I am still not shy about being a geek with dance. I still pack my bag the day before with excitement. I always say to dancers, never forget being the 15- and 16-year-old that you are, that you were, and how much you wanted to dance. That’s very, very important because that curiosity is what will propel you through your career. You don’t start at 10 saying that I’m going to dance for 20 years. You never know. The relationship with dance is lifelong. When you dance, you go through a phase where you love to dance, and you’re obsessed about dancing. There’s something that happens somewhere along the way where you stop dancing for yourself and you start dancing for everyone else that made it happen.
Thank you, Mavin Khoo, for being so generous in sharing your story with our students. We are so grateful for your time, vulnerability and wisdom.
