KYLIE MINOGUE AND GNOSTIC APOCRYPHA? There is a connection, albeit indirect:

Can't get her out of his head

* Helping Kylie Minogue with choreography is just one of Akram Khan's unlikely collaborations, writes Clifford Bishop
* December 21, 2006 (The Australian)

DURING her long and incomparably pert career, Kylie Minogue has provoked some powerful responses in a wide variety of men, but it's a safe bet that no other straight man has responded in quite the same way as the Anglo-Bangladeshi dancer and choreographer Akram Khan. "It was like looking into a mirror at my ideal self," he says. "An image of what I would like to be. The kind of honest, humble human being that I just didn't expect."

Remarkably, he seemed to have just as profound an effect on her. They met this summer, when Khan was working with a different kind of diva, the imperious French ballerina Sylvie Guillem, on a show called Sacred Monsters. Khan, trained from the age of seven in the Indian kathak style of dance, and Guillem, who was even younger than that when she realised ballet would be her life, had grown up immersed in rigorous classical traditions and wanted to explore their feelings of being liberated and, strangely, profaned as they broadened their horizons. "Kylie came to a rehearsal," Khan says, "and afterwards we talked for hours. She was really moved." It was only a matter of months since Minogue's doctors had told her she was cured of the breast cancer that had been diagnosed in 2005. "She told me about coming through that," he recalls, "of how it felt like a second chance and made her want to do something more spiritual."

So, instead of the slow, therapeutic build-up she had planned to her tour, the singer threw herself into two gruelling weeks of learning dance routines based on kathak. ...

This year, he collaborated with minimalist composer Steve Reich. Next year gets even odder. He is creating a piece with the National Ballet of China and collaborating with Juliette Binoche on a two-handed play called Gnosis, loosely inspired by the same apocrypha as The Da Vinci Code.

"It's based on the idea that the body contains all the knowledge you will ever need," he says, "and the goal of your life is to find it. It looks as if I'm diversifying, but I think I started scattered and now, in a funny way, I'm moving towards my beginning, becoming what I want to be." So, in light of what he said earlier, does that mean he's turning into Kylie Minogue? To Khan's infinite credit, whether as an actor or as a human being, when he says "I hope so", you don't doubt him for a minute.

My emphasis. No word on whether Kylie might be cast as Eve. Or Sophia.