A Dark Tale for a Dark Time, Told Through Indian Classical Dance

New York Times

11-02-2025

A woman advances out of the darkness and begins to move her arms with violent force, as if slashing and stabbing an opponent we can't see. She reaches down, seemingly pulling out her victim's entrails and holding them over her face, which is contorted in a masklike grimace.
This is the terrifying opening to the choreographer Akram Khan's 'Gigenis: The Generation of the Earth' (2024), coming to the Joyce Theater this week. The piece is a loosely inspired, pared-down version of the story of Gandhari from the Indian epic the Mahabharata. Gandhari, a queen, loses her sons in a brutal war brought on by their outsize ambitions. In 'Gigenis,' which Khan both directed and performs in, he plays one of the sons, killed by his brother.
It is a story, Khan said, that hits close to home. 'I mean, the world is in a state of war,' he said in a phone interview from London, where he lives with his wife and three young children. 'We just don't know it, or we choose not to acknowledge it.'
'We try not to talk about it because it just ruins the day,' he added.
'Gigenis,' whose title refers to a tribe of giants in ancient Greek myth, is a dark work for a dark time. But it's also one that brings Khan, 50, back to a story he has engaged with since his earliest days as a performer. At just 13, he was cast in Peter Brook's nine-hour stage production of the Mahabharata. 'It changed my life and the way I saw the world,' said Khan, whose family is from Bangladesh. He has since made a handful of pieces, including 'Gnosis' (2009) and 'Until the Lions' (2016), that deal with themes from the Mahabharata.
One of the lessons he said he took from Brook is an interest in universality. 'The loss of a child,' Khan said, 'no matter what culture you are from, you can at least identify with it.'
The other is a desire to tap into storytelling and genuine expression, or as he said, 'not to act, but to be.' It was something he said he had found missing recently in contemporary dance, his arena since the late '90s. (He has also worked in ballet; his 2016 reimagining of 'Giselle' was a hit for the English National Ballet.) Recently, though, he said he felt drawn back to classical Indian dance, which he trained in as a child in London and in India. It is a tradition rich in stories.
Though his early training was in the classical dance form Kathak, Khan said he long felt like an outsider in that world. 'When I was training in India, I always felt like a foreigner being from England, and I could see the way people looked at me,' he wrote in a recent email. 'It was quite demoralizing.'
Since 2019, he and his close collaborator Mavin Khoo have led three residencies, in Britain, India and Sri Lanka, for Indian and South Asian dancers. This was new for Khan. 'I've not really committed myself to working with Indian dancers until recently,' he said. 'And I thought, well hang on, let me just have a look at my own classical form.'
It was at a residency held in 2022 in Kumbakonam, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, that he met the dancers he would cast in 'Gigenis.' Four of the seven, including Khoo, specialize in Bharatanatyam, perhaps the most commonly practiced classical form. The youngest, Sirikalyani Adkoli, 18, is an Odissi dancer, a student at Nrityagram, a training center near Bangalore, whose ensemble regularly visits New York. (Adkoli was only 15 at the time of the residency.) Venu is a second-generation practitioner of Kutiyattam, an ancient form of Sanskrit theater from Kerala. (In 2012, she performed a solo evening at the Asia Society in New York City.)
'I don't really identify as a dancer,' Venu said in a recent video call from Zurich, where she was visiting family. 'I've always thought of myself as an actor.' But Kutiyattam performances include movement, music (mainly drumming), singing and mime — as well as extremely vivid costumes and makeup. In 'Gigenis,' she, like the others, does without these. 'It creates an interesting kind of vulnerability,' she said.
Venu, an intensely physical and dramatic artist, is the performer who opens the piece with that terrifying solo. 'In my mind,' she said, 'it represents the monstrosity of war, and how violence begets violence.'
Inspired by the residency at Kumbakonam, Khan originally planned to present a festival of Indian dance. But as he and the others began a rehearsal period in Italy last year, he realized he wanted them to come together to tell a single story, each performer using his or her style of Indian dance. The dancers brought material, which Khan — credited as director, not choreographer — edited and wove together into an impressionistic narrative about a woman (a queen, a mother, a wife) looking back on her life.
'It was really instinctual,' Khan said, 'a process of trial and error, trial and error. As we went along, my idea of what I was looking for continually changed.' And though he had not planned to dance in it — he has pulled back from performing the punishing evening-length solos he was once known for — he found himself drawn into the action.
At its center is Venu. As the protagonist, she conjures and observes the others, who enact scenes from her life. She mourns the death of her husband and crowns one of her sons (Khoo). The other son, played by Khan, is consumed by ambition. Their conflict leads to war, violence and more death.
In adapting Gandhari's story from the Mahabharata, he drew from several sources, ancient and new. One may be surprising: the TV show 'Succession.' 'I'd say it's the closest one could get to the Mahabharata today, excluding the religious part of course,' he said. 'Fundamentally it's about human flaws and the human desire for power. It's always easy to hate each other.'