Plunged into a realm of ultra-masculinity, Akram faced his fascination with aversion and physicality of violence by spen | dG1faVQxSnBhbjZ6eU0
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00:00Mixed martial arts, one of the fastest-growing sports on the planet.
00:07I'm here to understand the hold this violent spectacle has on us.
00:16I'm Akram Khan. I'm a dancer and choreographer.
00:20Oh, that's uncomfortable.
00:22I've spent eight weeks training...
00:24Are you allowed to do that?
00:26..with three of the top MMA fighters in Britain...
00:29Don't worry if you shit yourself with this machine, it doesn't matter.
00:33..as they prepare for career-defining fights.
00:40I want to know what makes these ultra-macho men tick.
00:45Is the violence that's on display here something that's in all of us?
00:49On it! On it!
00:51What happens when our two very different worlds,
00:54contemporary dance...
00:58..and MMA, collide?
01:02Yes! Yes!
01:06Mike studied philosophy and Japanese at university
01:09before dropping out to become a fighter.
01:15You build a vocabulary of techniques,
01:18and once you have those various techniques,
01:20you can form different sentences.
01:22Anything you're doing, if you can really get into it
01:24and lose yourself into it, then it's kind of freeing.
01:27It just takes a load of weight off your shoulders.
01:29You see a lot of things, if you're going to go for, like, dance,
01:32you have, like, whirling dervishes.
01:35Like, they do a thing and then they do it and then they do it,
01:39and they completely lose themselves in what they're doing.
01:41And all you are is, you are that moment.
01:44And you get that little taste of, I guess,
01:46what everybody's been looking for, for ever.
01:49Hammer, hammer, elbow, uppercut, overhand.
01:52I just see brute force, violence.
01:54I'm not trying to tell you that there's no aggression to it
01:57and there's no violence involved.
01:59Of course there is, but it sounds a bit tacky,
02:02but for me, there is a spiritual quality to it.
02:04So you think we all have kill instinct?
02:06100%, but we've...
02:08The modern society is very civilised,
02:12and it's not much use to us in this modern day and age
02:16to be able to exercise that ability.
02:19Today, there's no survival advantage
02:21for you being able to move the way you do,
02:23but there's something deeply fulfilling
02:25in exercising and moving your body in that way.
02:28And violence kind of gets said as a dirty word,
02:31but I think it is an important part of who we are and our make-up,
02:35and there is a healthy outlet for it.
02:38A lot of bad comes from when we try to repress
02:41what could be a natural, healthy impulse.
02:44Carl Jung talks about your shadow side.
02:48When you ignore it and repress it,
02:50then it becomes something, then it becomes a problem,
02:53then it becomes dark.
02:55So to be a fully realised person,
02:57he argued you have to incorporate your shadow side.
03:01If you don't deal with it, particularly in young men, I think,
03:04then they're going to find a bad outlet for it.
03:07Now you're going to try and let out on me.
03:10I'm just curious to know if I will really try to hit him or not.
03:15Well, you'd better have, because...
03:18You might get hit otherwise.
03:21That's the rules. That's the rules.
03:24How about it?
03:26No, that's not a punch.
03:28You're punching. Punching.
03:31Punching.
03:36Try and land one of those punches on the face now.
03:39Keep going. Ten seconds to one.
03:42That's it. There we go.
03:44Time. There we go.
03:46When Paul was saying, punch him hard, punch him hard, don't pretend,
03:49I started to realise that I was thinking of technique,
03:52and as long as I thought of...
03:54If I thought of violence and I thought that was a person,
03:57that's when I couldn't do it.
03:59When I was like, oh, no, he's teaching me something, a system,
04:02a technique to be effective,
04:04then the violence became numb when I finished.
04:07I realised that that's the very thing I don't like.