Alone, in pairs, and in groups, Pichet Klunchun and Akram Khan enlighten the stage with their dance.

Pichet Klunchun and Akram Khan’s collaborations in dance dialogues and dance theatre—whether solo, duet, or company works—remain engaging because of the way they mingle cultures.

Last year “Pichet Klunchun and Myself”, a demystification of khon with French performance artist Jerome Bel, was honored with European Cultural Foundation’s Cultural Diversity Award from the hands of HRH Princess Margriet of the Netherlands. The work is still touring the world, though it’s  rarely staged in his homeland.

Pichet recently opened his new studio in Thung Khru, Thonburi with a revival of “I Am a Demon”, his 2005 solo work that’s inarguably his most personal.

From the start, thanks to the video of the late khon master Khru Chaiyot Khummanee, it shows why Pichet is the Pichet we know today.

Eventually, with the words “I Am a Demon” repeatedly projected, newly choreographed movements show that his backgrounds in various forms of dance and theatre have been integrated into both body and mind.

He is now drawing comparisons among them as well as, and, given the freedom of contemporary art, creating new movements for the traditional forms, notwithstanding the rules.

Born in London of Bangladeshi descent, Akram Khan became interested in kathak as a child and went on to study with one of the masters the traditional Indian dance. Cast in a globe-trotting landmark intercultural theatre production of Peter Brook’s “The Mahabharata” in the 1980s and studied various forms of dance in university, Khan has seen the world and continued to walk the thin line between traditional and modern and among different cultural boundaries.

Apart from his famous solo works like “Polaroid Feet” (2001), his Akram Khan Company also turned heads and bagged awards with “ma” (2004).

In 2006, he collaborated with world-renowned Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui in “Zero Degrees”, a duet in which the two masters exchanged ideas and thoughts on choreography.

The following year brought another dance dialogue “Sacred Monsters” with French prima ballerina Sylvie Guillem. No surprise: both dance dialogues—which allowed major movers, from different backgrounds, to speak and share both with each other and the audience—had been touring to major cultural capitals and festivals around the world.

In early 2008, Akram worked with dancers from National Ballet of China in “bahok”, a contemporary dance work previously scheduled to be performed at Thailand Cultural Center but then cancelled due to the death of HRH Princess Galyani Vadhana. And that’s the closest we’ve been to seeing his work here.

Khan raised the ante in his latest work, a dance theatre collaboration with Oscar-winning French actress Juliette Binoche entitled “In-I”, premiered last October in London. One weekend run at the recent Hong Kong Arts Festival made it possible for me to catch it live.

Binoche—who never trained as a dancer and thus taking a major risk here—was able to pull off technically demanding and injury risking movements with the help of rehearsal director and dance coach Hsu Su-Man, albeit as a professional performer not as a dancer.