Akram Khan brings Lions to Tohu
Until the Lions escalates choreographer’s exploration of male/female relationship
Love and revenge are the age-old universal themes that underlie Until the Lions, a contemporary choreography by Britain’s Akram Khan that the Danse Danse series is presenting this month on the theatre-in-the-round stage at Tohu.
In a sense, Until the Lions is another exploration of the male/female relationship that Khan presented here in 2009 in In-I, his duet with actress Juliette Binoche. Until the Lions, however, is more intense and patently more violent. The two protagonists literally want to kill each other.
Two literary sources inspired Khan. One was a collection of poems by his acquaintance Karthika Nair titled Until the Lions: Echoes From the Mahabharata. The poems spoke about the female characters in one of India’s most ancient and celebrated epic poems. Dating back more than 2,500 years, the Mahabharata is an immensely long narrative about love, war, monarchs and conquest. Its complex intrigues involve innumerable characters. Compared to it, Game of Thrones reads as simply as Winnie the Pooh.
“I used (Nair’s) poetry as inspiration, which kind of liberated me to use the traditional Mahabharata as a starting point and not the central point of the work,” Khan said from his base in London, where he grew up with his parents from Bangladesh.
Simply told, Khan’s choreography follows Amba, a princess who is kidnapped by the godlike warrior Bheeshma. Amba falls in love with him but, for complex reasons, Bheeshma decides to remain true to vows of celibacy and abandons her.
“She’s betrayed because he’s loyal to his vow to a hierarchical system and principles, and she wants revenge, revenge, revenge,” said Khan. “Amba goes into the mountain forests and prays in stillness. The stillness is so powerful that the gods have to intervene because the stillness is turning the world to chaos.”
The gods grant her wish for revenge. But Bheeshma will not stoop to fight a woman or a child, so Amba must become a man.
“The only way to do that is to die and be reborn. Amba jumps into flames and is reborn, but she wonders how will the reborn baby girl remember her mission? A garland carries her memories. So she grows up, trains as a warrior and changes into a man.”
Ballet fans can recognize a similar narrative thread in the 19th-century classic Giselle, the story of a peasant girl who is spurned by her aristocratic lover, dies and returns to haunt him.
“When I was creating Until the Lions, I was conceptually gathering ideas and thoughts about Giselle,” admitted Khan. “They share initially a similar trajectory and then they really separate. Giselle is about love, betrayal and forgiveness. The other story is about revenge with perhaps redemption.”
Khan is an old hand at presenting narrative through gestures, having grown up dancing Kathak, perhaps the most narrative-based of India’s classical dance forms. But like his 2012 work Vertical Road (which, incidentally, was also inspired by ancient poetry), Until the Lions suggests events rather than presenting them literally.
“When we take gestures, we take them as a metaphor rather than as an exact point of reference. You can tell love or rage just by the intention of the characters, their physical attitude. They don’t have to kiss to show love.”
Indeed, kissing was rare in the romantic Bollywood films Khan grew up watching in the 1970s and ’80s.
“How can you say that’s not more sexual than actually doing it? It provokes your imagination.”
The dancers’ actions will be particularly exposed on the round stage at Tohu, the circus venue where acrobatics are melding with choreography more and more often to create as-yet-unclassifiable dance forms. Until the Lions had its première last year at another in-the-round theatre, London’s Roundhouse, where Khan created and
rehearsed the work. He subsequently made a proscenium-stage version, but Montrealers can consider themselves lucky to have Tohu to show the original conception.
“The 360-degree (version) was challenging. We filmed each rehearsal with four different cameras from four different sides, and each told a different story.”
For a dancer/choreographer trained to face front toward an audience, the round stage meant rethinking how to present the body. Showing your face to one side of the audience meant showing your butt to the other side.
“You have to come to a certain arrangement to find a sense of balance. It teaches you a lot about parts of the choreography you don’t really bother about.”
The dancers appear particularly exposed on Tim Yip’s 2½-tonne round stage, which looks like the stump of an immense tree and offers no theatre wings or shelter for the dancers to step from view. Also clearly visible are four people playing music composed by Vincenzo Lamagna, who also did the rather loud music for choreographer Hofesh Shechter’s Political Mother, seen here in 2012.
Taiwanese-born Ching-Ying Chien plays Amba in Until the Lions. Khan, a virtuoso soloist, plays Bheeshma, and Christine Joy Ritter, who danced in the Cirque du Soleil production Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour, is Amba’s male counterpart.
Khan, Chien, Ritter and the choreography were nominated for Britain’s 2016 National Dance Awards, getting the most nominations of any company. Last month, in a strong field, Chien won.
The award for best male classical dance performance, incidentally, went to former Montrealer César Corrales for his virtuoso turns in Le Corsaire. Montreal saw his big, raw talent as a teen. At English National Ballet, he has become a star.