The Mahabharata has been a kind of artistic home to Akram Khan. As a teenage dancer he performed in Peter Brook’s celebrated production of the Indian epic, and as a choreographer he’s returned several times to its imagery and ideas. His 2009 work Gnosis was inspired by one of its characters, Gandhari. And his latest production, Until the Lions, uses Karthika Nair’s poetic adaptation of the Mahabharata to focus on the story of Amba, a princess who is abducted from her betrothal ceremony by the powerful and obdurately celibate Prince Bheeshma, and who takes revenge on him by killing herself and assuming the form of a male warrior.
Khan, working for the first time in the Roundhouse, works in collaboration with his superb designers to create an epic theatrical space. The circular stage is a giant slice of tree trunk, the world as a living organism, but it is also the battleground on which Amba, Bheeshma and their invisible armies rage against each other, watched over by the blackened, severed head of an old warrior.
Around the edges are four musicians whose fiercely percussive rhythms, and sweet and clamorous vocals, evoke a universe of war, lament and prayer. And in the middle are the three dance characters through whom Khan has compressed his story down to bare essentials: Ching-Ying Chien as Amba, Khan as Bheeshma and Christine Joy Ritter as a skittering, slithering and eerily tormented presence who seems to function both as a figure of destiny, and the spirit driving Amba’s revenge.
Sometimes the concentration of the action makes the story impossible to follow – the opening section is particularly impenetrable. But as we settle into the work, Khan’s choreography creates its own urgent, atmospheric logic in which plot and character move naturally in and out of focus. In his own performance of Bheeshma, Khan has utterly denatured the silken fluidity of his usual dancing style; instead, he moves with the stiffened gait and crude force of a rigid, battle-proud man who has made himself immune to the influence of women
Chien’s Amba, by contrast, is an elusive, protean figure. As the royal princess, she moves with weightless delicacy, her arms embroidering light and air, but when she’s preparing herself for revenge her body slows into a meditation of folding, balancing, contorted moves, and in battle she becomes a machine of war, her arms working like pistons, her body all hard, slamming angles.
Khan is fascinated by the interaction of male and female principles and one of the work’s most arresting moments comes when Amba tries to make Bheeshma see and touch her as a woman, her hands reaching out to him, his body flinching in retreat. When they meet in battle, it’s his recognition of Amba in her warrior guise that “unmans” him and it’s her tender attempt to embrace him that seems to deliver the mortal blow.
This closing scene is also the work’s most extraordinary coup de theatre. The fact that a woman has triumphed over a great prince puts the universe out of kilter, and as cracks in the stage open up, and as the light and smoke of battle rise through them, it’s as though the world is waiting to see what happens next. Without fakery or strain, Khan captures both the intimacy of the moment and its cosmic scale.
-
At the Roundhouse, London, until 24 January. Box office: 0300-6789 222.
