Akram Khan remembers seeing Disney’s animated version of Rudyard Kipling’s the Jungle Book when he was about eight years old: “It was the first time I’d ever seen a person who looked like me represented on television,” says the British choreographer, whose stage version of the tale makes its Australian premiere next week. Back then, he was a skinny kid with long curly hair living in southwest London, “fragile but also athletic” like the “man cub” Mowgli thanks to training in Bengali folk dance and Indian classical dance Kathak. “It was as if that film was made for me. At that time, I believed it,” he recalls.
At 10, he was cast as Mowgli in a classical Indian dance production of the Jungle Book, and his fondness for the story has endured over the decades, even as Disney’s film and Kipling’s book have come to be regarded less as cultural treasures than embarrassing anachronisms peddling racism and British colonial ideology.
