 was my first time collaborating on a dance project. It also marked my first collaboration with Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. Early on, we realised that the idea of doing scenography wasn't really the most challenging thing for me and so I in fact ended up making copies of Akram and Larbi as rubber dummies. I took Akram’s dummy on the Eurostar and delivered him to Akram and Larbi, who were rehearsing in Antwerp. I had cut into his elbows, shoulders and knees so they were only held together by a rope connector. When Larbi picked up this very floppy object, it was just a fantastic moment. He started playing with it as you would with a doll, except that this was Akram, and it was Akram’s size.

Immediately something very rich and interesting came out of it – about body doubles, but also about how something falls, and about the acknowledgement that the lifeless body has its own syntax that isn't meaningless.

Akram took us on an extraordinary journey, and interestingly it was Larbi who was the Virgil in this: Larbi gave Akram the mission to begin to reflect on this particular story of going to Bangladesh as a Bangladeshi born in Britain. One of the interesting things was that we made a double out of a living body, but what Larbi did was to make a double of Akram, out of his personal story, by copying every hand gesture and every phrase of this story as it was told for the first time. This very personal story became a universal one about our present state of multinational displacement. What is an identity and from where do we derive it? The dummies became useful in a similar way: by making a copy you can look at the original in a new way.

, Sadlers Wells, London. Photograph by Tristram Kenton