Christopher Walker reviews Akram Khan’s Jungle Book
Akram Khan’s latest work is big, bold, and beguiling. Packed with new ideas and electronic wizardry. It’s just a shame the dancing gets eclipsed.
Khan’s Outwitting the Devil was one of the most disturbing and fascinating dance pieces I’ve seen. So I came to Jungle Book with high expectations.
Khan is a dancer and choreographer of Bangladeshi descent, born in Lambeth.
He says the inspiration for his “re-imagining” of Kipling’s classic, came after reading Amitav Ghosh’s book on climate change – The Great Derangement.
And after his eight year old daughter told him “Enough’s enough Papa. Every piece of work that you do is so dark.”
So he thought he would “make a work for young people, children and adults alike” and “something that did not neglect what’s happening in the world today.”
That is exactly what he’s done. Though I fear the many children in the audience might still find it all rather dark.
In this version, Mowgli is a young girl who watches her family drown in the rising waters caused by global warming.
Finding refuge in a ruined city taken over by wild animals, she’s adopted by a pack of wolves, and then embarks on a wander encountering an escaped dancing bear, Baloo, and the Bandar-log, a liberated gang of lab monkeys.
The giant rock python Kaa is inveigled into eating them up.
As such, the audience are lectured not just on climate change, but also on animal experiments, animal cruelty, and even the benefits of vegetarianism.
The dancing is of course top notch. Particularly Tom Davis-Dunn as Baloo and Pui Yung Shum as Mowgli.
But the dancers are made to feel a very small part of the proceedings. The use of voiceovers reduces them to miming.
No child would come to this and understand the wondrous way in which dance itself can communicate.
They’re dwarfed by the extensive use of (very good) videos and animations by Nick Hillel, though in this very whizzbang production for some reason Kaa is represented by series of cardboard boxes.
More dancing Khan please.
https://www.akramkhancompany.net/
Photo credits: Ambra Vernuccio.
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