The Jungle Book Reimagined

Akram Khan Company 
Perth Festival
Heath Ledger Theatre Theatre

Mutiara

Marrugeku
Perth Festival
Studio Underground

Artistic Director Iain Grandage’s fourth and final Perth Festival is entitled Nnaangk – the Nnoongar word for ‘sun’, a female deity associated with warmth, nurturing and healing. In this context the Akram KhanCompany’s Jungle Book Reimagined is a surprisingly dark and dystopian work – even though it’s described by Grandage in the program as being ‘created with family audiences in mind’.

 

Khan ‘reimagines’ Kipling’s collection of stories about an Indian boy raised by wolves as a cautionary tale set in a future ravaged by climate change. Mowgli (in this version, a young woman, played by Jan Mikaela Villanueva) is a climate refugee separated from her family during a storm at sea. She washes up in an abandoned city reclaimed by animals who’ve escaped from captivity. Baloo (Tom Davis-Dunn) is a former circus-bear; Bagheera (Holly Valis) is a domesticated panther raised in a palace; the bandar-log monkeys are the traumatized survivors of lab experiments; Kaa is an escaped python from a glass cage in the zoo. In a more significant reversal, the tiger Shere Khan is now a gun-toting human hunter who shoots animals on sight.

 

As in Kipling’s original, the animals conveniently talk to each other and Mowgli (who also understands and talks back to them) in English (a device which is somehow more jarring onstage than it was on the page). In Khan’s production, they’re played by a cast of ten dancers (Kaa is represented by a collection of cardboard boxes with glowing red eyes manipulated by a team of dancers), as well as appearing in beautiful line-drawn animations projected onto scrims across the front and back of the stage (the hunter Shere Khan is represented by an animated shadow). They’re also ‘voiced’ by a separate cast of actors in a pre-recorded soundtrack – a fatal misstep which for this reviewer kills the show, as it disconnects the dancers from the audience and makes us feel like we’re watching a kind of ‘live cartoon’.

 

There’s no denying the virtuosity of the cast, or the distinctiveness of Khan’s choreography, which draws on traditional Indian kathak as well as contemporary dance, predictably incorporating a lot of ‘animal’ work on all fours. However, the synchronised coordination of the dancer’s movements with the pre-recorded dialogue is reductive and over-literal; ironically it makes them less like animals, and more like humans using mime. 

 

The set design is relatively minimal (apart from the projection scrims), consisting of a bare stage and a few piles of cardboard boxes (which according to Khan in a program note demonstrates the show’s commitment to sustainability). On the other hand, the staging is heavily reliant on video and sound technology (including a Hollywood-style ‘exotic’ score by composer Jocelyn Pook). All of this swamps the work of the dancers, as well as being at odds with the overall message about reconnecting with the natural world. 

 

Harnessing Kipling’s stories and characters to the theme of climate change is a noble cause but reduces their complexity. As a result the show feels more like a work of Victorian moralising than the original. It also doesn’t address Kipling’s obsessions with abandonment and foster-families, colonialism and exile, and the contradictions between ‘the law’ and more ‘primordial’ impulses. Kipling's animals are not really animals at all, but human beings; Mowgli the 'man-cub' is arguably a representation of Kipling himself. 

 

All of this is brushed over in Khan’s ‘reimagining’ – ironically so, given the dancer/choreographer’s own cultural heritage as a British-Bangladeshi artist born in London, much of whose work has been preoccupied with his own conflicted sense of home and identity. His autobiographical solo show Desh, which came to the Melbourne Festival in 2012, remains the most powerful work of his I’ve seen. In comparison The Jungle Book Reimagined feels like a missed opportunity.  

 

*

Broome-based Indigenous intercultural dance theatre company Marrugeku’s Mutiara is more intimate and reflective than their previous production Jurrungu Ngan-ga (Straight Talk), an explosive large-scale work about the incarceration of Aboriginal people and asylum seekers. Nevertheless the two share a common focus on racialised violence and oppression as defining mechanisms of White Australia since colonisation. 

 

Mutiara (which means ‘pearl’ in Malay) deals with the history of pearling in Broome, from its Indigenous antecedents – when pearl shells were carved and worn or traded across the continent and the region – to its colonial expansion as a global industry in the 19^th Century, when pearls were primarily used for the manufacture of buttons in Europe. This expansion involved the enslavement, forced labour and exploitation of Aboriginal, Malay and Japanese divers, all of whom were overworked and many of whom died from decompression sickness.

 

The four performers are also co-choreographers: Dalisa Pigram (who is also Marrugeku’s co-artistic director alongside Rachael Swain, the show’s dramaturg), Soutari Amin Farid (who is also its cultural dramaturg), Zee Zunur and Ahmat Bin Fadal (who is also an advisor on pearl diving history and Malay culture). Collectively they bring to the work a strong mix of choreographic traditions and practices including Indigenous and contemporary dance as well as the Malay martial art known as silat. 

 

All four also have strong cultural and geographical connections to the work: Pigram was born and raised in Broome and has a mixed Yawuru/Bardi and Malay/Filipino heritage; Farid, Zunur and Bin Fidal are Malay Singaporeans. Bin Fidal also has a more personal connection: th the work: now in his 80s, he emigrated to Broome in the 1960s and worked as a diver in Broome from the 1960s until he retired after a near-fatal accident while diving, and this experience is a central thread in the content of the work. 

 

The form is episodic and thematic rather than narrative-based. Certain sequences stand out: Zunur’s opening appearance as a quivering Bomoh (a Malay shaman-figure who acts as a kind of portal to the spirit world) with her hair hung forward in a curtain over her face; Pigram and Farid joyfully and lovingly partner-dancing to the popular music of the 1950s in defiance of regulations against interracial fraternisation; Farid doing an elegant fan-dance with two pearl shells; Bin Fidal performing an austere solo based on his sidat martial arts training; and most memorably Pigram doing a hauntingly expressive dance with spoken text invoking the fate of Aboriginal women who were kidnapped and enslaved (or ‘blackbirded’) in the 19^thCentury and forced to dive as well as being used as sex slaves (many of these women were pregnant because it was falsely believed that this gave them greater lung capacity for diving).

 

At other times the choreography is less specific and seems to wander and lose focus, as if an over-reliance on task-based improvisation has led to simply maintaining and exploring various physical or emotional states. This impression is underscored by the over-use of dim, moody lighting and ambient or repetitive music tracks. The set design by visual artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah – consisting of a downstage pile of pearl shells and an upstage curtain of ropes which hung from the lighting grid and were reminiscent of the riggings of pearl luggers or the signal-ropes to which divers were tethered, as well as resembling fronds of sea grass – also induces a certain visual monotony, notwithstanding the fact that the ropes are also used as a projection surface for black-and-white archival footage of the pearling industry as well as being variously manipulated by the performers. 

 

A sense of being in an underwater world is effectively evoked, but even when Bin Fidal moves around the space reading aloud in Arabic from invisible gravestones we never emerge from a realm of memory and reverie. Recorded voiceovers using stereotypical accents and featuring excerpts from archival texts of racialized pseudo-science or officialese add a further layer of horror but are clumsy in execution, and (like the archival video projections) reinforce the sense of being continually pulled out of the present moment and back into the past.

 

Mutiara covers important historical ground, features some deeply moving performances (especially from Pigram and Bin Fidal) and is grounded (like all of the company’s work) in the authenticity of the performers’ connection with the material. Nevertheless in comparison with Jurrungu Ngan-ga the work feels underdeveloped and lacking in direction. It’s as if the aura of nostalgic myth surrounding the pearling industry still hasn’t quite been dispelled, despite the history of violence lurking beneath its deceptively placid surface.  

 

*

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen), in which capacity as the band’s front-man he developed a unique form of contemporary dance combining elements inspired by Isadora Duncan with the traditional Austrian Schuhplattler. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return.