Akram Khan’s “Gigenis” Mines the Drama of Indian Classical Dance

Recently, at the Joyce Theatre, I attended a war. The war was a dance, “Gigenis: The Generation of the Earth,” directed by the British dancer and choreographer Akram Khan, loosely inspired by the story of Queen Gandhari, from the ancient Hindu epic the Mahabharata, who miraculously produced a hundred sons only for them all to be killed in battle. “Gigenis” was danced by seven exponents of Indian classical traditions (including Khan), accompanied by seven musicians. Khan, whose family is from Bangladesh, was trained both in the Indian classical dance form Kathak and in contemporary Western techniques. As a child, he performed in Peter Brook’s legendary 1985 theatrical adaptation of the Mahabharata, and he has since made several dances on themes or stories from the epic. Working with his London-based company and elsewhere (notably, the English National Ballet), he has often melded Kathak and Western dance.

But in “Gigenis” he has shifted course. Feeling that something was missing from contemporary dance, he turned back to Indian classical dance, in search of a way, as he recently told an interviewer, “not to act, but to be.” In the past few years, he and Mavin Khoo (a performer of Bharatanatyam, another Indian dance form) convened a series of residencies in India, Sri Lanka, and Britain for soloists in classical Indian dance, drama, and music. “Gigenis” (which returns to the U.S. next month) grew out of this process, and Khan is careful to note that, although he directed the work, the choreography was made collectively.

What emerged is a seventy-minute dance about the life of a woman who is also a queen: girlhood and love, marriage and motherhood, the death of a husband in war, and the loss of one son at the hands of another. And although the title suggests earthly renewal, the dance documents a timeless cycle of violence, rivalry, and vengeance.

The performance begins on a darkened stage, with the sound of drums and an impending storm. As the lights come up, we dimly see a woman crowning a man, with a crown made purely by her fingers, splayed high into a curved lattice shape. A riot of bells and singing marks the moment, and we then see an elevated row of musicians seated on each side of the stage—vocalists and players of Indian drums and Western instruments. A line of dancers, each one under a cone of light, faces us, and a woman in simple Indian dress steps out of the line and walks toward us.

She is the queen, played by Kapila Venu, a leading exponent of Kutiyattam, an intensely dramatic style of theatre from Kerala. She plants herself in a wide squat before us and seems to enter a trance of memory and prophecy: her body shakes; she hunches in fear; her hands make the shape of a gun and she shoots, pulls back, shoots again. Then, mouth wide open and eyes bulging fiercely, she appears literally to grow and expand, taking on a monstrous form as her presence consumes the stage, until finally she lifts an imaginary dead body and, with gouging and devouring movements, reaches the depth of her possessed terror.

The spell breaks and she falls to the floor and urgently scribbles, obsessively recording the events that have overtaken her soul. The other dancers advance like a chorus and perform angular, martial movements in unison. Then everything stops, and a gentle voice intones, “In another time, I was a daughter, and then a wife, and then a mother, and then I have been alone”—a mantra that is repeated again and again, as her life unfolds before us. And, as each of these former selves is invoked, the women she once was step forward. For the rest of the performance, the queen is split into four: daughter, wife, mother, and her present elder self. At this moment, the emotional structure of the piece shifts: we are now inside the queen’s mind, and her memories are also ours. The fourth wall disappears, and we feel we are part of the dance, which is itself becoming a ritual of collective grief. We are in the past and the present at the same time, watching the woman watch her younger selves—with the terrifying knowledge of what is to come.

The dances that follow are less narrative than mythic. There is a plot, but you don’t need to know it. The heart of the matter is told through gesture, imagery, and repetition—a circular looping of time. The choreography draws on several Indian classical dance languages, performed by a cast also versed in yoga, martial arts, ballet, various modern-dance techniques, and more. This hybridity is not blended into a single tongue. Rather, each classical form is put to dramatic use: we see clearly the theatricality of Kutiyattam in Venu, and the contrasting delicacy of Odissi in Sirikalyani Adkoli’s performance as the daughter. Bharatanatyam yields both the expressive partnering of Vijna Vasudevan and Renjith Babu (as the wife and her husband) and Mythili Prakash’s power and precision as the mother. The rhythmic and narrative thrust of Khan’s Kathak suffuses everything. One thing that these traditions share, though, is an immediacy that answers Khan’s desire “not to act, but to be.” We experience the events onstage less as a representation of a story than as something that is happening right now before us, even though they are also part of a seemingly eternal human tragedy.

And so the queen watches, touches, and feels a thousand things, as she weaves in and out of her memories. She sees her daughter-self playing. Then the wife and husband, to whom she is invisible, stretch across her and join their bird-winged hands with hers, before opening out into their own private dance of fluttering, flowering movement. The queen is not just watching a memory; she is guiding its outcome. She is a woman, but she is also a figure of fate.

When her husband departs for war, the stage goes black and she is left alone in a thin stream of light. She begins again to quake, morphing into her horrific state, as the gentle voice tells us, “Do not think this is war, it is not war, it is the end of the world.” This may mean the apocalypse, but what we feel is the destruction of the small, intimate world of her love.

Now the mother stands over two man-boys (Khan and Khoo), and we realize that it was Khan who imagined himself crowned at the start. He playfully grabs the finger-crown from her and spins in a giddy circle, before she takes it back and their crown-shaped fingers mingle overhead in a shaft of golden light. The boys drop away and her fingers, illuminated, grow into a mesmerizing fire, flickering at fantastical speed, licking the light, flaming higher and higher.

This astonishing image is still with us when we see the queen and the mother sitting together on a bench, with husband and wife standing behind them, a hand on each, like an echo from the past. When the husband sinks lifelessly into the queen’s arms, her mother-self, sitting beside her, stares straight ahead and opens her mouth wide in a silent scream. Darkness falls again, and time seems to unspool and circle as the voice returns: “In another time . . .” And this woman, like women before and since, covers her husband’s body, while her mother, wife, and daughter selves dance sorrowfully together.

The queen lifts the crown—those filigree fingers!—from the dead body, and the two sons begin a ritual fight for succession. When she passes over Khan and crowns his brother, he rages and tries to crown himself, clasping her fingers to his head, and flame seems to race over his undulating chest and arms. Soon, the brothers confront each other in a tense, martial dance that brings them face to face over their dead father’s body. A hand is extended and refused; the scene disperses.

By the end of the piece, the old queen is squatting once more, deep like a tree trunk, her limbs shaking. This time, her memory is upon her, and the events she once recalled and presaged will now be enacted before her by her warring sons while she grimly presides. And when she gives the nod to one son to kill his brother and the blow is cast, the scene freezes one last time. Like his father, the dead son slumps over the bench. The pulsating warlike dances return, and the queen scribbles madly on the ground before collapsing before us. Her only living son gathers her up and the voice again returns: “In another time” (he backs away) “I was a daughter” (she is left alone) “and then a wife” (she looks at each of her hands) “and then” (lights out, all black, breath) “a mother.” ♦