Cultural host · Slough

Amina Khayyam Dance Company

Amina Khayyam is the Founder & Artistic Director of AKDC. A critically acclaimed performer, choreographer and dance theatre maker, Amina estimates she has donned the kathak costume for over 1000 performances throughout her career from professional productions on international stages to schools, community centres and charity events. Amina Khayyam began her Kathak dance training with Alpana Sengupta in Croydon progressing to professional level with Sushmita Ghosh at The Bhavan (London) under whose guidance she made her professional debut at the Purcell Room, Southbank. Apart from performing and choreographing, she continues to lead intergenerational workshops with various ages from the least engaged and disenfranchised sectors. Amina’s relationship with kathak in her earlier years was marked by difficulty and obstacle having to escape cultural restriction to attend classes – a world she has not forgotten but returned to make it a source to make all her work. Her first professional choreographic piece “Laal Shaari”, selected to perform as part of ROH Firsts saw her research with Bangladeshi women of over 50's. The process extended to empowering their creativity bringing it to final production such as a tableux of washerwomen in a dance sequence in Yerma, or the thousand dolls made as back-drop for A Thousand Faces. Strong bonds have been developed with this sector where they have become first time users of mainstream arts spaces, individuals have been engaged to be creative, expressive and empowered – a skill level that has fed into pioneering the Outreach section of her company, treated as equally important to performance work.