Some performances are built for a single unrepeatable night; others carry their setting with them wherever they travel. Thikra: Night of Remembering belongs to the second kind. Designed for the open desert canyons of AlUla under the stars, it has just completed a run at New York's Lincoln Center, proof that a piece built entirely around one very specific landscape can still hold its shape thousands of miles from home.
Commissioned by Wadi AlFann, AlUla's forthcoming destination for contemporary art, Thikra is the work of choreographer Akram Khan and visual artist Manal AlDowayan, playing out through an all-female cast of nine to fourteen dancers who blend the classical Indian forms of kathak and Bharatanatyam with contemporary movement. The piece takes its name from the Arabic word for memory, recollection and remembrance, and it's built around exactly that: the retrieval of a lost past and the work of collective healing.
What separates Thikra from a straightforward touring dance production is how much of AlUla actually lives inside it. AlDowayan designed its costumes and sets using natural pigments and traditional craft techniques, working directly with artisans from Madrasat Addeera, AlUla's arts and design centre, to hand-craft the ceremonial banners used onstage. The score, composed by Aditya Prakash, folds in contributions from musician Loulwa Al Sharif and local percussionists from AlUla Music Hub, the sound of the place itself, not an approximation built in a studio elsewhere.
The community threading through the piece goes deeper than the programme credits suggest. In the five months before its 2025 premiere at the AlUla Arts Festival, the production ran more than thirty workshops with over 250 local residents aged six to seventy-five, covering movement, music and design. Forty members of AlUla's community led the opening procession toward the stage on opening night, not performers brought in from outside the region, but neighbours of the piece's own subject matter.
"Creating Thikra: Night of Remembering in the vastness of the AlUla landscape was a profound experience, where the dancers and nature became one," said Akram Khan, the production's choreographer and Artistic Director of Akram Khan Company. "Bringing that experience to the stage has been an invitation to rediscover the work in a new way. It feels deeply meaningful that this is the Company's final touring production; it is a piece that reflects on what we remember, what we leave behind, and how stories continue to live on through others."
Manal AlDowayan, who designed the production's visual world, described the work in similarly personal terms: "Thikra: A Night of Remembering is about the power of memory, women's stories, and the strength of community… As we take this performance around the world, I hope it resonates with different audiences, creating a sense of connection between people, places, and the stories that shape us. Remembering is an act of strength, and this piece is a celebration of that."
Since its 2025 debut, Thikra has played to more than 45,000 spectators across Saudi Arabia and Europe, including a run at France's Montpellier Danse Festival. Its current U.S. tour continues through the autumn, with performances scheduled at the Charleston Gaillard Center, USCB, UCLA, The Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe, and the Mondavi Center in California through mid-October. Hamad Alhomiedan, Arts and Creative Industries Director at the Royal Commission for AlUla, called it "a world-first for Saudi Arabia" that "highlights the invaluable contributions of local talent and craftsmanship from the people of AlUla", and on the evidence of its reception so far, from Lincoln Center to the Montpellier stage, that claim has held up in rooms a long way from home.
