Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center
New York City, NY
July 5, 2026
Written by Aditi Dhruv for Line & Verse
Photo Credit: Christopher Duggan, courtesy Lincoln Center
Akram Khan’s Thikra: Night of Remembering was presented at Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City Contemporary Dance Festival, as part of the inaugural Pasculano Collaborative for Contemporary Dance.
The Lincoln Center Contemporary Dance Festival is the banner event for the new Pasculano Collaborative for Contemporary Dance, a twice-yearly program returning each summer and winter. The Collaborative gives contemporary dance the consistent, ambitious home it deserves at Lincoln Center, bringing together productions diverse in both origin and approach to contemporary work, with support for local, national, and international artists alike. Built on the premise that contemporary dance deserves to be produced at scale, it plays an active role in expanding the definition of the form.
Thikra had a lot going for it. And a lot working against it.
Per the program synopsis, Thikra depicts a matriarch flanked by two forces, the Vessel and the Shaman, who together lead their tribe in reflecting on their collective past and summoning an ancestor spirit from Knowledge Rock.
This piece was initially set in the Saudi Arabian desert, created for the AlUla Arts Festival in Wadi AlFann, Valley of the Arts, AlUla, Saudi Arabia.
Khan is a celebrated international choreographer known for dynamic, crisp, fast movement paired with Noguchi-esque set designs, and this piece was no exception. Thikra has strong elements of bharathanatyam, kathak, and contemporary work, set against a large boulder-like cave by Saudi artist Manal AlDowayan, with striking, atmospheric lighting designed by Zeynep Kepekli. While the intended setting of the original work was a vast Saudi Arabian desert, it found a good New York home at the Alice Tully Hall.
Thikra is especially notable for its all female-presenting, global cast, spotlighting matriarchal wisdom and matrilineality. The dancers are strong and a genuine delight to watch, with movements – both lightning-fast and molasses-slow – that are simply delicious. Mythili Prakash, as the matriarch, is a brilliant artist well known to New York audiences. Joy Alpuertro Ritter, Ching-Ying Chien, and Elpida Skourou stand out, and the chorus dancers are uniformly stellar.
Worth noting: the chorus is a global cast that came together for only a month of rehearsal, then, for this tour, reunites in each new city for rehearsals before the performance. Despite not living or training together between engagements, the chorus moves with remarkable coordination and attentiveness to the smallest details of each other’s movement – a testament to their skill and discipline.
Khan knows good dancing. He has a gift for spotting strength and rigor in a dancer, and for assembling ensembles of performers unafraid of that rigor. He’s also finely attuned to good music and capable musicians – all signatures of his work.
That’s where the compliments end.
What we saw was a masala of incantations, Purcell’s Dido, a Bulgarian women’s choir, gilded face paint, pooja, shamanism, Zikr whirling dervish, runes, and Khan’s perennial touchstones: the Mahabharata and loose, unstyled hair. Artistically, it read as a mash-up of influences – Pina Bausch, Chandralekha, Martha Graham, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Petipa’s Giselle – so many elements thrown together that the piece became a too-long blur of nothingness.
Instead of a legible, engaging narrative, what came through was stereotypical Orientalizing and a kitchen-sink of iconic elements and sacred spirituality.
Khan’s recycled ideas land as well as they do only because of the intelligent and extremely capable dancers. The finely tuned dancing body in command of its craft is a wonder in and of itself, and these dancers are a beautiful example of that. (If the dancers don’t win a Bessie, the flying hair should!)
Thikra was billed as a talisman of matriarchy – yet it was choreographed and directed by a man. That distance shows: matriarchy filtered through a male gaze, however well-intentioned, is not the same as matriarchy told from within.
If this is meant to honor matriarchal memory and wisdom (especially given how central hair is to Khan’s visual language), the absence of an elder, grey-haired dancer in that role feels like a missed opportunity. A grandmother-type presence would have grounded the piece’s central premise well.
It leaned too hard into the haunting: the intensity of music and movement, the dramatic lighting, the mystery of the narrative all blurred into something monotonous and monochromatic.
The inclusion of “Aaj Jaane Ki Zid Na Karo” was the cherry on top of an already cloying piece. For those who understand the lyrics, it’s a cheap tug at the heartstrings; for those who don’t, it merely sounds meditative enough to inspire awe. Either way, it was a lazy choice.
Repetition can create ritual, and ritual can be mesmerizing – some audience members told me as much – but this wasn’t an interesting ritual. It was boring and repetitive, even soporific.
Khan is no stranger to New York audiences. As part of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City programming – particularly its Choose-What-You-Pay ticketing – Khan’s work, and contemporary dance more broadly, extends further than usual, with a focus on audience engagement. As a result, many in the audience were experiencing his work for the first time – a real credit to how Lincoln Center and the Collaborative prioritize breadth of curation and democratized access.
Overall, Thikra was an intense, physically demanding piece packed with many elements, but by the end, the question remains: what was Khan trying to say?
Khan has noted this will be the company’s final work. Maybe it’s time.
Aditi Dhruv is a movement educator, dance mentor, writer, retired performer of Contemporary Indian dance based in New York City.
