Last year, Akram Khan, England’s leading Asian dancer–choreographer, stunned the dance world community when he announced he would stop performing in 2018 and that his last show would be Xenos, meaning ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’. It premièred at the Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens, on 21 February, and reached Australia for the closing days of the Adelaide Festival.

Khan’s imminent departure from the stage, at the age of forty-three, is to be expected; he has been performing the rigorous Kathak technique since childhood. It will be a great loss audiences and luminaries such as ballerina Sylvia Guillem, actor Juliette Binoche, sculptor Amish Kapoor, and singer Kylie Minogue, who have collaborated with him in contemporary dance, a genre he rapidly colonised with his Bangaldeshi heritage.