Farooq Chaudhry
Portrait: Damian Chapman
Since 1999 Farooq Chaudhry has worked with dancer and choreographer Akram Khan to develop and produce his work as an artist. Together they have founded the Akram Khan Company, and over seven years of collaboration Akram has emerged as one of the world's outstanding performers and creators. He has drawn on his virtuoso ability and deeply-felt relationship with the Kathak tradition, and with the contemporary world of which he is part, to express an investigation of tradition and modernity in a series of landmark collaborations with artists from other disciplines such as music, dance, the visual arts and theatre.
Farooq's collaboration with Akram has been fundamental to this success. Akram speaks eloquently of the spirit and soul of their relationship, which has provided the basis for his achievements as an artist. Farooq has also created a carefully conceived business, governance and organisational frame for Akram's work, to offer the optimum conditions for his development as an artist. Farooq has built the web of relationships and collaborations, spreading across continents, artforms, disciplines, and sources of support, that has made Akram's journey possible.
Farooq believes passionately that others should feel empowered to follow their instincts as producers. When he ended his career as a dancer in the late 1990s, his own instinct was that he 'wanted masterpieces'. He discovered the role of producer as a basis for involvement with Akram's work intuitively as well. Since then, his working practice has developed into a fully realised and inspirational expression of what the producer can offer to artists, audiences and the wider cultural context of which they are part.
K: I have heard you talk about 'serving your ideas' to 'build' a piece of work. Can you tell me more about this?
F:Ideas come from very small things often -meeting someone, seeing something, having a dream, a discussion -and out of that emerges a seed. I catch this seed and elaborate it by talking to people, conjuring, imagining, feeling it, fleshing it out until it's something that can become a real life project. Then we can release it, it's like a birth process, you create this gestation and the idea becomes formed. It's born, you free it and serve it, and let it follow its own path. This is the most fragile and crucial period in the creative process. It's easy to find an idea but it's infinitely harder to serve and be loyal to it. A threat can be that the idea starts to serve you. It requires a great deal of focus, trust and discipline.
There are moments when you have doubts -is this really what we want to do? But I don't let that be a reason to put the brakes on. I let the idea keep existing, evolving at its own natural pace, and I build all the parts around it. You're creating something that starts with a single thing. A brick, a step. You may put a chimney up first or a side window. You build this thing and soon it involves lots of people. It's impossible to build something on your own - there are a lot of us working on it. We all put in our contributions, and it becomes something coherent that we can believe in and respect, something we trust will be what we want to say, though what you want to say is often not truly clear until it's said. If you stay too much in control, you're containing it.
Our ideas are built up with the optimum conditions, the right money, the right collaborators, with the right reference points and process over a period of time. We nurture them so they can find their own independent voice, so they can exist on their own and be appreciated by others. You have a responsibility to the people who are eventually going to engage with it. That's doesn't mean you make it with the audience in mind, but you want it to be seen, accepted and judged by other people. Otherwise why do we do it?
K: I have also heard you talk about the importance of 'staying free'.
F: We always need to be clear about what we're trying to do and to reassess this often. To be fixed on things is dangerous. You don't know what's going to happen. And you discover new ways of thinking about things. Increasingly, I would say that I've never had a strategy as such. I've been making it up as I go along, following my instincts about what we need to do. That doesn't mean there hasn't been any planning or preparation, but the word 'strategy' is much over-used. It suggests that from the outset there's a conscious and clear path. In a discussion with someone a while ago, they said 'strategy is just a rationalisation of what has already taken place'. I have to agree with them. I would also say that, for me, luck is when opportunity meets preparation. At times, we've been 'lucky'.
K: You have created some very particular approaches to the company's governance, business model and organisational structure.
F: Yes, I've pursued a professionalisation of the structures, in order to best support the artistic aspirations. It's about effectiveness and efficiency. It's important to focus on the business side of what we do. Too often, there's a feeling that art and business are not good bed partners, that they are like oil and water. But actually they can mix extremely well. You're judged by the results, by the consumer, ultimately. And it's about taking risks, being under pressure, knowing when to invest in the future, good timing for your decisions, developing your ideas and reshaping them so they remain interesting for others, to keep yourself firmly in the marketplace. It's about developing the brand, expanding the audience.
In Beijing recently, I heard someone talk about the artist as the inventor, and the producer as the innovator who innovates the product into the marketplace, who leads on how you take it out into the wider world. This gives the artist more freedom, helps them to realise the scope of their potential and to make the environment in which they work so much more enriching.
His role as a producer has been crucial in offering me the support I needed to move forward with a sense of clarity and artistic strategy. Farooq has been a partner, in terms of strategy, planning and artistic goals for the company. He has been a support in the most profound way.
He encompasses many important roles, such as manager, friend, advisor and even student at times - any artist needs all of these at different
stages in his or her career. But in my opinion, the most important thing has been the collaboration of our friendship. This is the key to our progress,
and it has been something truly organic and real.
Our collaboration gives me an opportunity to share thoughts, doubts, frustrations, ideas and opinions. I feel privileged to have the gift of
another artist by my side, constantly whispering in my ear when solutions need to be found. Not always does Farooq come up with a solution, but to know that someone is close to you, ready to support and protect your vision, is sometimes more comforting and useful than finding the solution itself.
Farooq is a producer with no formulas. That is his formula. He adapts and constantly re-evaluates every decision and choice he makes. However, his principles are simple and powerful, and are strongly embedded in the decisions he makes and the way he conducts himself with me. Honesty, loyalty, perseverance, ambition, and, most importantly, humility are some of his qualities from which we can all learn.
Akram Khan
K: In your work with Akram you combine an incredibly positive energy, with clear long-term vision, and an intuitive responsiveness and decision making.
F: I have always known that I have to be optimistic, purposeful, inspired, creative, ambitious, determined, and positive. I need these things. They are the engine. Looking back at my life so far, I can see that, apart from all the things that I've learned formally, much of the way I am has been shaped by my early upbringing. I came from an extremely poor background as a kid. My parents came to England as immigrants in the 1960s. They were not into the arts at all. For them, there was a huge sense of demoralisation as people and to us as a culture and to our ethnicity - it was the time of the whole Paki bashing thing, with lots of racial tension. I struggled with my sense of identity and self-esteem. It was a terrible thing to live through, but it does make you very resourceful. I saw I had to be proactive and clear about what I wanted, that I must make opportunities, take what there is and double it, triple it.
My background also meant I was always having to build bridges between societies, between cultures, between class, race, from early on in my life. It was a very powerful thing, always being challenged to reconcile difference, polarisation. And now with Akram, with the projects we're deciding on, it's about building bridges between two diverse places. That's always been my attitude to life. How do you take an actress to a dancer, or a Chinese company to an English audience? How do you build a bridge between these two different cultures, these two different voices? I started off with a lot of fear of
difference, and now it's become a source of inspiration, a source of desire, of challenge.
A problem that I'm becoming more and more aware of is, how do we keep the internal world of our work sustainable for ourselves? Each time we conceive a project, it requires a new world that we must create, and we have to find a new set of rules for it. It takes a lot of emotional and physical energy to find this new underpinning for the thing you're about to build. So we plan to take time to step out, to push the pause button just for a while, in two or three years. We have a gut feeling that this will be a very, very good thing to do.
I hope this book can help provide an access point for others who are setting off on their journey as producers. It is important that we don't mystify what is involved. The most important thing is their instincts for what they are trying to do. I feel passionately that artists can benefit so much from what good producers can offer them.