What if Mowgli ended up in a concrete jungle and killed the bear hunter who nearly killed Baloo? What would the young man in Rudyard Kipling’s story do if his colleagues in the animal kingdom were forced to emigrate because of global warming?
Choreographer Akram Khan reimagines The Jungle Book (1894) as a fable for our time in which Mowgli – whom the animals here take for a girl – is called to be a Greta Thunberg who must restore humans to sanity and thus stop climate change.
“Be careful, every human invention is something that we animals cannot control!” Bagheera warns when he sees the hunters approaching with firearms. The same panther longs for the times when “we called them humans and lived in harmony… until man changed.”
Jungle Book Reimagined , the new show by the London choreographer of Bengali origin, one of the most famous creators on the contemporary scene, whose Giselle was recently seen at the Liceu, premiered on Friday at the Madrid en Danza festival, raising effusive reactions among the heterogeneous audience of the Teatros del Canal, who on this occasion had come with children. The theme was very educational: the intrinsic need to belong and establish links with others, and the importance of connecting with the natural environment and respecting it.
But the way of telling that fable, which starts here with the shipwreck of Mowgli’s family fleeing from the rising waters, is a creative discovery in the world of dance. With video design and animation from YeastCulture, Khan makes the dancers – who bring to life monkeys, dogs, tigers, panthers, bears… or even carry boxes that simulate the sibylline snake – magically interact with the elephant, the birds or the sly mice that appear like a cartoon turned into a hologram. All this in a devastated city that the animals have made their own.
The visual effects are undoubtedly state-of-the-art, but the dance work is not far behind. The dance-theater seems to go to another dimension, because as it is a story the word abounds. And with Khan’s characteristic animalistic and organic movements, the ten performers in his company dance not only to Jocelyn Pook’s original music, but also to the meaning of the phrase and the dialogue, avoiding the fearsome risk of literalness.
Trained in the kathak dances of India, Khan has created a hybrid language with the combination of this discipline and the contemporary dance that he discovered in his adolescence. However, his thirst for hybridity does not end here: no artistic discipline is alien to him. The 2012 Olivier Award winner for his iconic solo Desh likes to take risks and think big, explore the unknown, tell stories through dance. Innovating is his hallmark.
And faith that he achieves it with exquisite care in sound design (Gareth Fry), lighting (Michael Hulls), visual set design (Miriam Buether)… However, Tariq Jordan’s script or perhaps Sharon’s drama Clarkand fail to open a new window in the minds of the adult public.
