A NEW work by the acclaimed choreographer Akram Khan is always a highly anticipated event in the world of dance-theatre. The creator of such spectacular pieces as XENOS – a memorable reflection on the First World War, which played at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2018 – he returns to the Festival this year with Jungle Book Reimagined.
“I wanted to take something that I grew up with as a child,” he explains, talking of Rudyard Kipling’s famous series of stories. The Jungle Book was so much a part of Khan’s early years that, he remembers, “I even played Mowgli in a dance-theatre production when I was a child.
“It’s a beloved story to me,” he continues. The choreographer notes that the famous Disney version constitutes just “a small part of the original Jungle Book, which is mammoth”.
Kipling’s story collection is, he comments, a “huge” work of literature. “The story of Mowgli, the child in the jungle, is only a fragment of the whole piece.”
Khan’s connection with The Jungle Book has, inevitably, been complicated by the history and politics of the man who wrote it. He is, he says, “very aware of Rudyard Kipling’s love of the British Empire”.
This, he explains, “created a lot of contradictions” within his motivation for making a show based upon Kipling’s work. “I felt that, in the heart of it, it belongs in India.”
Kipling was, Khan continues, “inspired by India”. The question, in adapting Jungle Book for a piece of dance-theatre, was: “whose lens do I choose to see this narrative through?”
The answer – in making a very modern, distinctly post-colonial story from Kipling’s book – was to have a new narrative created by writer Tariq Jordan. The author of the play Ali & Dahlia (which considers the Arab/Israeli conflict through a tortured romance), Jordan is also an actor.
Khan considers Jordan a “wonderful, young writer”, and the right person to join him and his other collaborators in a project that reimagines Jungle Book. The result is an up-to-the-minute piece in which the animals (who are the primary protagonists) live in the jungle of a modern city.
If this seems reminiscent of the first, global lockdown of the Covid pandemic – in which we witnessed nature returning to urban environments abandoned by humans – there is a good reason for that. Khan was inspired, he says, by the extraordinary images of animals wandering city streets and, in an astonishingly short time, the canals of Venice transforming from their normal murk to clear water.
“The lockdown had a huge influence” on his adaptation of Jungle Book, the choreographer says. “There were fish in the canals in Venice,” he exclaims. “This was after just a few weeks of lockdown!”
Khan’s mind was particularly focused on the environmental crisis by Amitav Ghosh’s book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. “I think that’s what triggered this whole journey,” he adds, regarding the decision to make a show about climate change.
Khan was particularly impressed by Ghosh’s writing about the marginalising of nature and of animals within literature. These days, the choreographer says, books about animals are considered to exist almost entirely in the realms of non-fiction, natural history and the like.
INDEED, Khan says, “Ghosh has tried multiple times [to find a publisher for novels in which the protagonist is an animal] and didn’t get published.” We have, the choreographer observes, turned our back on a history of stories, stretching back millennia, in which nature was ever-present. In doing so, we have turned our back on nature itself.
In fact, in Khan’s profession of choreography, it was only a little over a hundred years ago that Stravinsky created his ballet The Rite of Spring as a hymn to nature. “Nature is God,” in that piece, Khan comments.
In that ballet “nature is the voice that we have to negotiate with.” Sadly, the choreographer adds, “that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Human beings no longer consider themselves “guests on the Earth”, says Khan. Instead, we say, “we own the Earth”. The consequence of that, he comments, is that “we’re taking from the Earth, but we’re not giving anything back.”
The choreographer is, he says, “in awe that an invisible thing, a thing we cannot see, called a virus, has brought the whole of humankind to its knees.” That is, he believes, “a gift and a curse from nature”.
If Khan has been greatly influenced by Ghosh’s writing, he has also been very impressed by the campaigning and the speeches of the young Swedish environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg. Consequently, he says, climate change is “at the heart” of his version of Jungle Book.
In this version of Kipling’s story, the frame is not a romanticised, colonial idea of the Indian jungle, but, rather, the climate chaos of our 21st-century world. Khan remembers being humbled by his ever-inquisitive young daughter who, commenting on the famously large scale sets of his shows, asked about the carbon footprint of their transportation.
Consequently, mirroring the environmental concerns of the show itself, the sets for Jungle Book Reimagined use recyclable cardboard boxes that are sourced in each of the
countries in which the piece is performed. In addition to that, much of the setting of the show is virtual, using stylish animations to evoke animals, for example.
In addition to the ecological dimension in the show, there has been an important change in the central human figure. Mowgli – the main representative of humanity within the tale – is now a female character.
KHAN doesn’t take the credit for the gender shift in the child character. He remembers a mid-pandemic conversation with his daughter (who is now nine-years-old) in which she asked, perfectly reasonably: “Can I be Mowgli? Why does Mowgli always have to be a boy?
”She loves Mowgli,” the choreographer explains. Which is little surprise, given that the stories have been read to her throughout her childhood and that she has seen every screen and stage adaptation going.
“I thought: ‘Why not? Why shouldn’t there be a female protagonist?,” Khan recalls. And so, in Jungle Book Reimagined we have a female Mowgli.
However, unlike the Disney version – in which the chief of the orangutans famously wants “to be like” a human – Khan’s staging doesn’t place humans at the top of the hierarchy. Indeed his piece seeks to view the story from the perspective of the animals themselves.
In the story Khan and Jordan have created, the animals communicate with each other telepathically, and humans are none-the-wiser. Conversely, in an idea that is made for dance-theatre, the animals “don’t understand what Mowgli is saying, except through her energy”.
The choreographer’s body of work seems to me to speak to an artist who – despite his immense critical acclaim – is not interested in being seen as a creator of “high art”. Is there, I wonder, a desire embedded within his work to dispense with notions of “high” and “low” art entirely, and make great work that is accessible to the widest possible audience?
THE very notion of high art has, Khan replies, “never sat well” with him. In fact, he says, “I decided never to be in the room with high art, because there’s only good art and bad art.
“There’s a myth with the idea of high art that the more popular something is, or the more accessible it is, the less important the work is. Prince wasn’t that, Kate Bush wasn’t that to me, they were artists. Charlie Chaplin wasn’t that, neither were Bruce Lee, Muhammad Ali, Buster Keaton. These are artists for me.”
This respect for great artistic work, regardless of its categorisation, goes back to Khan’s upbringing. He grew up, he explains, with his mother telling him stories from all of the great world religions and from the ancient mythologies of China, Greece and many other places.
“She never just said, ‘read Rabindranath Tagore’, the Nobel-prize winning poet, which is high art, I would say. She loves him, but she says, ‘that’s not the only art’. I think she was the one who said to me: ‘there’s high thinking, but it doesn’t make it high art.’”
It’s hard to imagine higher thinking than Khan’s deep concern about climate change. It’s equally hard to think of a dance-theatre work with greater potential to excite than his reimagining of Jungle Book.
Jungle Book Reimagined is at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, August 25 to 28.
