Akram Khan’s ‘Gigenis’ Is His Most Potent Work in Years
Like many ambitious artists, the British choreographer Akram Khan can confuse impact with magnitude. His opera-house productions often suffer from bloat. Even if he didn’t have personal connections to the Indian epic the Mahabharata — he appeared in Peter Brook’s mammoth production while a teenager — the subject might have tempted him by its sheer size.
Yet “Gigenis: The Generation of the Earth,” his 2024 adaptation of a story line from the Mahabharata, is domestic in scale, fitting nicely onto the stage of the Joyce Theater, where it had its United States premiere on Wednesday. Inspired by the tale of Gandhari, a mother who loses her 100 sons in an epic-size war, the work reduces the son count to a Cain-and-Abel-like pair, illuminating the age-old themes of the seduction of power and the cyclical nature of violence by focusing tightly on the mother and her grief. It is Khan’s most potent effort in years.
It is also a welcome return to his roots in Indian classical dance. Khan, who trained in Kathak as a young man, has gathered expert dancers and musicians in other classical forms, like Bharatanatyam and Odissi. The choreography is collective and hybrid. Khan serves as director and plays one of the sons.
The star is Kapila Venu, who plays the mother figure. The story is told from her perspective, in memory after the worst has happened, as in Martha Graham’s modern-dance treatments of Oedipus and the Oresteia. She silently recalls her youth and courtship, the death of her husband and the murderous rivalry of her sons, as those episodes are enacted by the other six dancers.
Venu is a master of Kutiyattam, an ancient storytelling form that usually involves highly elaborate makeup and costumes. Here she is stripped of those theatrical tools. No matter. In an early, tone-setting solo, she conjures violence as an elemental force — cutting and stabbing invisible enemies, slitting her own throat. Somehow she seems to swell, like the Incredible Hulk. Her eyes bulge, their whites expanding, their pupils shrinking. This is terrifying.
It is also tragic, since she is the victim of the violence. Scenes from her past flow, one into the other, with elegant transitions as Venu mirrors each dancer taking her place. The storytelling, less sophisticated and potentially confusing than in Graham or pure Indian classical forms, is impeccably clear.
The young Odissi dancer Sirikalyani Adkoli embodies the woman’s flirty innocence. Renjith Babu, as her husband, the king, joins Vijna Vasudevan in a tenderly wavy love duet that introduces a choreographic motif of hands entwining to form a bird in flight. Khan and Mavin Khoo cling to Mythili Prakash in a mother-and-sons scene that is at once sweet and foreboding. They play with the idea of succession, passing around an invisible crown invested with all the corrosive allure of the Ring of Power.
Khan is especially good here, disappearing into sibling rivalry and greed for his mother’s favor. Grabbing the crown, he spins with a speed that’s both boyish and sinister. Prakash, too, reveals power adeptly; as she holds the invisible crown in a shaft of light, her rippling fingers make us see how fascinating it is but also how erratically it jumps, how it gets away from her.
After the king dies, playtime is over, and the sons fight over the crown until one kills the other. All along, the action is periodically distanced by a soft, calm female voice of narration. “In another time,” it says, “I was a daughter, then a wife, then a mother.” Not just in another time, but “several times.” Again and again, the killing and being killed repeat. “And again, I am alone.”
All this is intensified by the score, both original and traditional, and the onstage musicians, excellent though overamplified. Melodies float on melodies, and the drummers goad an unstoppable momentum. Nina Harris, on double bass, accompanies a happy scene of motherhood with ominous sliding around that suggests the underlying grief and the roar of airplane engines.
That’s a reminder of war, as are jump-scare booms and the sound of bombs as heard from inside a shelter. Over and over, the show rises to a ruckus, only to freeze into sudden silence. “Gigenis” is about cycles, but this effect feels overdone.
On the whole, though, Khan’s tendency to inflate seems to have been brought under check by a classical discipline. The patness and forced happy endings of much of his work are absent, replaced by a tragic sense of life. “This is not war,” the narrator says. “This is the end of the world.” As always.
Gigenis
Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan, joyce.org.
