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.
But as Khan says, it’s complicated. “Disney took one part of it – the story of a little boy raised by wolves – but Kipling’s Jungle Book is huge and many of the stories within it were inspired by Indian mythology. You can recognise all the characters, they just have different names. So there was something that moved me. But of course, it’s equally problematic because Kipling was a lover of empire … [and] inherently racist.”
Reimagining the Jungle Book has long been on Khan’s bucket list, along with Shakespeare’s Macbeth (which he will tackle in 2026 with the Danish Royal Ballet) and Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (which inspired Khan’s 2023 work Creature with the English National Ballet). It’s part of a shift in his work away from the abstraction of his earlier, best-known works (including Xenos and Desh) towards narrative adaptations.
That the source texts are problematic is partly the point, says Khan. “You can’t cancel stuff; you can’t just shut things off and say ‘I want to edit that out of my history, my memory’ – because it will repeat again. You have to keep the past in front of you to learn from the mistakes. For some reason, my generation and the younger generation feel like the past is gone.”
Khan’s Jungle Book Reimagined, which premiered in 2022 in the UK and lands in Canberra next week before runs at the Perth and Adelaide festivals, extracts arguably the best parts of Kipling’s story and Disney’s adaptation, creating a contemporary myth that feels timely. It mixes levity, pathos and action, and weaves Khan’s choreography with animations, voiceover dialogue, and a haunting soundtrack by Jocelyn Pook (whose credits include Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Scorsese’s Gangs of New York).
“I wanted to remake Jungle Book because in the essence of it, it’s about a little boy who learns from the animals the danger of what humankind can do to nature,” says Khan. “And I wanted to present it through the lens of my daughter, who is super focused on climate change. Because in the end, she’s inheriting it.”
Khan’s daughter, who was eight when he started planning the work during lockdown in 2020, played a key creative role. “She was in all my meetings, because I was in my office in the loft, and she would be sitting in the corner drawing, but actually listening and writing stuff down,” he says. “And then she came to me one day just at the end of the meeting, and she said: ‘Papa, you’re talking about change?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I’m doing this work because I want to make change.’ And she said, ‘Papa, you want everything around you to change, but you are not changing.’”
“I was really taken aback,” Khan recalls. “But I realised that is the dilemma of the human condition right now, the modern person: We all want change, but we don’t ourselves want to change. So I said, ‘OK, why don’t you sit in all my meetings, and give me notes.’”
First, she asked why he was transporting huge sets around the world when it was so bad for the environment. “So I talked to [designer] Miriam Buether, and the whole team – and I said ‘We need to make a change … We need to be super light.’ And that limitation allowed – forced – us to be creative.”
Jungle Book Reimagined deploys projected animations (by London company Yeast Culture) and cardboard boxes to create its setting: not a jungle, but a post-apocalyptic cityscape ravaged by rising waters, to which the animals have fled as their natural habitats are destroyed.
In Canberra, boxes will be sourced locally and recycled after the show. The Perth season will feature boxes custom-made by a local company using recycled material, which will then be transported to Adelaide for the show’s final stop – after which they will be recycled and repurposed.
Khan’s daughter also asked him why Mowgli had to be a boy, provoking him to reimagine the character as an eight-year-old south Asian girl. In the show’s opening, we see her separated from her mother during a flood; she washes up in the city, where she is reluctantly taken in by the animals.
Popular animal characters feature in the production, including fierce Bagheera the panther, goofy Baloo (here a former circus bear) and crafty Kaa the python. But the villain, Shere Khan (who Kipling gave a conspicuously Muslim name), is not a bloodthirsty tiger but a human hunter who stalks the city with his rifle raised. The animals’ perspective is foregrounded, but Mowgli’s trajectory from bewildered child to determined young woman and climate warrior is the beating heart of the show.
Khan, who describes Jungle Book Reimagined as a “family show”, wants children, parents and grandparents to watch it together: “For me, it’s really important that you’re sitting down with [the older generations] who did the crime. Because you cannot forget. My problem with so much of society now is that we choose to forget.”
The Jungle Book Reimagined runs February 2-3 at Canberra Theatre Centre; February 9-17 at Heath Ledger Theatre in Perth; and March 15-17 at Adelaide Festival Centre
