Perth Festival 2024 presents Akram Khan’s Jungle Book reimagined at Heath Ledger Theatre

English dancer and choreographer Akram Khan’s introduction to Disney’s 1967 animated Jungle Book film has forever stayed with him. “It was the first time I saw a brown boy as the lead character in an animation and I was like, ‘that’s me’ because he actually looked like me, or I looked like that,” Khan recounts from his home in Wimbledon. “I had long black hair and I was kind of scrawny. I was always a bit more animalistic than everyone else, so there was something very similar in the characteristics and the way Disney Mowgli moved. I felt this was my story.” Khan’s Bangladeshi parents had moved to London before he was born and, having lived through a war that was about defending language and culture, his mother insisted Khan and his sister learn Bangladeshi folk dance from a young age. Revealing an aptitude for the art form, Khan moved on to classical Indian dance, kathak, while contemporary dance would come later, after being cast at the age of 13 in director Peter Brook’s stage play of Mahabharata and touring internationally for two years. A long list of cross-discipline collaborations has seen Khan work with everyone from Juliette Binoche to Kylie Minogue on her Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour, admitting he had crushed on the Australian star during her Neighbours days and was impressed by her humility while he choreographed a section of her concert in 2006. This was six years after Khan co-founded Akram Khan Company, taking on the role of artistic director with Farooq Chaudhry as producing director. The team established a reputation for an artistic vision that respects and challenges Indian kathak and contemporary dance, while also embracing other art forms in their storytelling including theatre, music and animation. Rudyard Kipling’s classic remained with Khan, and in 2018 when the father-of-three began to think about what he was passing down to his young children — in the form of inherited climate change — he circled back to the tale for Jungle Book reimagined. “The crisis of climate is really a crisis of culture because at some point the modern civilization decided to separate the consequence of human action to nature,” Khan, who turns 50 this year, shares. “There’s a deep umbilical cord between human action and nature. The consequence of what you do, what you take, you must give back. If you don’t give back and you just keep taking, then eventually you will have nothing left to take. “Each generation believes they’re better than the previous one and I think it’s really important to listen to the past, because we have a tendency to repeat ourselves, we just do it in different modes and different ways.” With Jungle Book reimagined, Khan, writer Tariq Jordan and all the collaborators wanted to find a way to remind people of the cyclical errors. “What’s happening in the Middle East, and what’s happening in Ukraine and Russia, is very much in Jungle Book reimagined. A lot of what’s happening in the world is in Jungle Book reimagined,” he says. “I think the only way it differs to real life is that it’s done poetically. I always say art is politics’ sweeter tongue. Everything is political and it’s rubbish if somebody says they’re not political. Every choice you make is political, but it’s how you say it, how you do it, why you do it and what your intention is. “My intention was really to bring parents, grandparents, children and grandchildren together to remind each other of the importance of consequences of human action in relation to nature.” Jungle Book reimagined had its world premiere in Leicester during 2022, following Mowgli’s journey through the eyes of a refugee caught in a world devastated by the impact of climate change and featuring all the traditional Jungle Book characters including firm audience favourite, Baloo. “The dancers spent a lot of time looking at animals, studying animals and trying to understand their mechanics before I decided which person would play which animal, which character,” Khan recounts. It has travelled around the globe ever since, with dates scheduled into 2025, including a season at Perth Festival 2024, continuing Khan’s tendency to tour shows for three years until he has finished his next. He recommends the work for children eight years and older, having created the show when his eldest daughter was eight at the time and taking some of her criticisms onboard, including making Mowgli a girl and practising what the show preaches — reducing it’s carbon footprint by using animation and sourcing any set pieces at each tour location. She even prompted Khan into selling his diesel car. “I think there’s a time for them to listen, which they don’t, and there’s definitely a time for us to listen to them,” he adds. Jungle Book reimagined is at Heath Ledger Theatre, February 9 to 17, tickets at perthfestival.com.au.