It must be 20 years since I first saw Akram Khan dance, and I will never forget the impression he made in a brief impassioned solo; here was a master of the Indian kathak school who had seen how its traditional vocabulary could be related to the less constricted realms of modernism. Since then he has gone on to fulfil his promise and broaden his aesthetic, notably through his extraordinarily powerful Giselle for English National Ballet. At 48, he has virtually retired from performing, but he continues to choreograph and direct his own company, enjoying a considerable international reputation.
Most recently he’s homed in on an environmental agenda and I’m ambivalent about the results. Creature was first staged by ENB in 2021, when it drew generally negative reviews. Eighteen months later it has returned to more positive acclaim, but it still fails at the level of narrative, not least because what one sees on stage bears such scant relationship to the synopsis in the programme.
Half naked, the brilliant Cirio dances like a desperate, wounded animal
Drawing on the archetypes of Frankenstein’s monster and the victimised soldier Woyzeck, it depicts the interior of some sort of polar research station where the eponymous freakish outsider has been conscripted as a guinea pig for a dastardly experiment with extreme cold. Creature is in love with his keeper Marie, but he is at the mercy of a brutal camp commandant who has his own designs on her. An apocalyptic collapse ensues, but it’s not clear to me what specifically causes it.
A fiercely pounding score by Vincenzo Lamagna and an impressively austere design concept by Tim Yip contribute to a richly sinister atmosphere, which Khan furnishes with some menacing, if predictable, fascistic parades for the proles and drones. If only there wasn’t so much empty repetition and a bewildering succession of pointless exits and entrances. Erina Takahashi is wasted as Marie; the commandant (Fabian Reimair) is too melodramatically nasty to be plausible.
What holds the show together is an astonishing performance by the brilliant American Jeffrey Cirio in the title role: half naked, he dances like a desperate wounded animal fighting his way out of a trap, writhing and imploring for his life and liberty. I was put in mind of the descriptions of Nijinsky’s shamanic intensity as Petrushka; Cirio radiated something of the same total selfless immersion in the Creature’s not-quite-human agony. What a loss to ENB that he has returned to Boston Ballet.
Khan uses his own company for Jungle Book Reimagined, first seen at last summer’s Edinburgh Festival before landing at Sadler’s Wells and now touring England, Europe and North America. It takes some of Kipling’s characters – Mowgli, the Bandar-log, Kaa, Baloo and Bagheera – and appropriates them to a new storyline in which Mowgli becomes a refugee from catastrophic flooding and on the run from the clutches of the wicked Bandar-log.
Once again, the climate-change warnings are laid on with a broad brush, but here they are directed at children who will doubtless relish what amounts to a multimedia pantomime along the lines of Life of Pi and My Neighbour Totoro. There’s spoken dialogue to which the dancers mime, the digital and non-digital visuals are realised with witty invention, and Jocelyn Pook’s music provides a colourful soundtrack.
Even if Khan’s choreography gets swamped by the spectacle, his fine troupe of a dozen dancers gamely impersonate the menagerie and there are some marvellous isolated images – for example, the haunting opening tableau of a stage peopled by static silhouetted figures slowly melting and wilting.
Although there is much to marvel at, much to charm, I think it’s time for Khan to move on, or back, to explore territory more austere and formal. Less tub-thumping, more dancing, please.
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