Ethic of care built into family-friendly dance production Chotto Desh’s every gesture

Chotto Desh

Akram Khan Company (UK)
Singtel Waterfront Theatre at Esplanade
March 21, 7.30pm

Chotto Desh, meaning “Little Homeland” in Bengali, is the family-friendly adaptation of Akram Khan’s stage show Desh (2011), the autobiographical solo in which the British contemporary dancer and choreographer explored identity at the crossing point of cultures, political struggle and belonging.

Directed by Sue Buckmaster of London theatre company Theatre-Rites and having premiered in 2023, this version turns its focus more squarely towards childhood.

It keeps sight of pain, dislocation and conflict without flattening them or lapsing into the kind of emotional overstatement that often afflicts work made for younger audiences.

At its centre is Nico Ricchini, an irresistibly animating presence. He captures the volatility of childhood with tremendous physical intelligence. Wonder, glee and sudden petulance ripple across him as though he really were a strong-willed three-year-old testing the limits of his world.

Chotto Desh asks much of its audiences’ imagination, and wisely trusts them with that task. Production company YeastCulture’s animations, Ricchini’s deft pantomime and a staging built as much on suggestion as statement open up a generous space for children and adults alike to enter the story for themselves.

At its best, the show hovers somewhere between Charlie Chaplin-style silent comedy and an indie animated short – nimble in movement, wistful in tone and rich in visual wit.

What Buckmaster’s staging does especially well is chart a child’s effort to work out who he is and where he might stand in the world, all while listening, sometimes obediently and sometimes not, to the words and stories of his elders.

In the “Anger” scene, Akram practises alone in his room, ignoring his father’s repeated demands that he come and help with the cooking. The dancing is exhilarating: determined, elastic, often joyful and stitched from ballet, jazz, Michael Jackson-inflected pop vocabulary and Kathak.

On one level, this is the familiar story of the gifted young dancer who feels misunderstood and retreats further into art because family and community cannot yet recognise what compels him.

This reviewer has often found that trope faintly self-romanticising, if not outright self-absorbed. Yet, the grandmother’s intervention shifts it into something wiser: “It is your job to worry about him, it is not your job to live his life for him.”

In that instant, the story opens out beyond artistic vocation into something larger and more ordinary: the necessary, fraught business of becoming oneself. Guidance and care matter, but no one can walk that path on another’s behalf.

For all that Chotto Desh brings together, what lingers most is its quiet conviction in theatre’s value and purpose. Dance is part of that, as are awakening independence, social unrest and the hubbub of urban life. Yet, the deepest impression is left by the production’s sense of responsibility to its audiences.

In the post-show discussion, Ricchini spoke movingly about performing for the possibility that a child in the audience might be at the theatre for the first time, and about wanting his performance to be part of why he or she returns.

That ethic of care seems built into Chotto Desh’s every gesture, even after 500 runs of the show. When the 12-year-old Bangladeshi telephone support worker tells him, near the end, “Now you know where you are, and what you need to do”, the line resonates beyond the plot.

Leaving the theatre, one wonders whether the rest of the people know that too.