Dancer/Choreographer Akram Khan will speak with Cal Performances’ interim artistic director Rob Bailis in the weekly open session of the Arts + Design course Creativity, Migration, Transformation taught by theater director and playwright Peter Glazer. Khan is celebrated for physically demanding, visually arresting solo productions that combine Indian kathak with contemporary dance to tell stories through movement. In an exclusive West Coast engagement he will perform XENOS, his final full-length piece as a solo performer, at Cal Performances in Zellerbach Hall Saturday, March 2 and  Sunday, March 3. In this emotionally visceral work Khan conjures the despair and alienation suffered by an Indian soldier recruited to fight for the British Crown in the trenches of World War I.

Co-curator of this semester’s Arts + Design Thursdays series, Peter Glazer teaches in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. His plays, adaptations, collaborations, and directing projects include Woody Guthrie’s American Song, winner of a Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award, among many other works. He is currently cowriting a musical based on The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness, by Berkeley storyteller Joel ben Izzy; co-writing a new play with Celtic harp virtuoso and storyteller Patrick Ball, Come Dance with Me in Ireland; and adapting Karen Shepard’s historical novel The Celestials for the stage. 

For more information, visit artsdesign.berkeley.edu/events/arts%2Bdesign-thursdays.