FORM-Idea

Akram Khan’s magical dance-theatre retelling of Kipling’s classic tale is a moving piece which weaves in modern themes of climate change and migration to a traditional favourite revisited.

In the original tales of The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling is highly critical of mankind and the society it has created, Mowgli is torn between accepting his humanity and returning to his village or staying with the animals in the jungle. With this in mind one can assume that he would approve of the choices that Khan has made by bringing this story up to date, setting it against a backdrop of global warming and war. One may question if we need reminding of these themes as they are discussed daily on the news but Khan says that he wants people to go away and talk about them after his show, after ‘listening’ for a while. For him, the theatre is the only place where we sit and pay attention now, without the distractions of our phones, iPad or laptops.

In this version, Mowgli is a young girl, a ‘climate migrant’ separated from her family whilst fleeing their land. She enters a deserted space of dilapidated supermarkets and empty libraries occupied by wild animals where we meet the old favourites: Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther, played by dancers who spent hours watching videos of animals to perfectly mimic their movements. With the use of projected animation, we learn about her back story and see glorious life size elephants, giraffes, monkeys and mice.

In this piece, Khan has created something engaging, meaningful, moving and new. In his collaboration with Yeast Culture, who spent a year preparing the images needed to project the animated characters on to an invisible screen and writer Tariq Jordan, himself a migrant, Khan shows us what is possible when we take the best of technology and put it to good use, merging dance, theatre and animation onto the stage.