Leigh Donlan reviewed the Sat Feb 15th, 2025, matinee performance at the Joyce Theater in New York
British choreographer Akram Khan’s latest work – GIGENIS, The Generation of the Earth – made its U.S. premiere at the Joyce Theater last week, its fifth stop on a world tour that started in Aix-en-Provence and arrived via Singapore, London and Paris. A sensational company of dancers, musicians and vocalists animated this timely tale of power, greed and loss, inspired by a story from the Mahabharata about Queen Gandhari and the slaughter of her 100 sons. Through traditional kathak and other Indian classical dance forms, Khan and six other dancers performed a condensed story of two sons of opposing temperaments, from the mother figure’s retrospection after losing her husband and one son to war.
Onstage musicians and vocalists blended classical Indian instruments of percussion and strings, layered with traditional incantations and poetic narrations, further intensifying the storytelling.
In her portrayal of Gandhari, Kutiyattam artist Kapila Venu tied this performance together with her masterful and astute acting skills. In an early scene, she depicted the horrors of war with bulging eyes, flying motions alternated with stabbing motions as she killed an unseen body then ripped out the imagined innards like an animal, grunting as she ate them, leaving us stunned and silenced.
A series of vignettes revealed Gandhari’s former selves as a daughter and wife. Sirikalyani Adkoli was joyful and flirty as the innocent daughter, with expressive kathak hands, face and eyes. Vijna Vasudevan delicately entwined her wrists and hands with her husband’s (Renjith Babu) in matrimony, creating the image of a steadily ascending bird. Gandhari mirrored her former selves from afar as the ensemble gathered in circles for fertility dances, their watery, wave-like arm motions eventually conjuring a pregnancy and birth.
A female vocalist narrated: “Do not think this is war. This is not war. This is the ending of the world…” Then “He was killed… and he killed… I am alone…”
After her husband died at war, the suddenly widowed mother, danced by Mythili Prakash, considered which son should inherit her husband’s crown. Khan, the more chaotic and selfish sibling, snatched the crown from his mother’s hands, sending himself spinning on his heels, consumed by ambition. Though still grieving his father, Mavin Khoo as the peaceful brother embodied a palpable calm and reverence.
“Whose war?… Whose fire?… Whose hand?… Whose anger?”
Prakash as mother sat her boys down for a cautionary tale about power and, in another strikingly poetic visual, she lifted the invisible crown into the light, her fingers rapidly fluttering as if ignited, her hands becoming a perilous flame.
The conflict between the two sons leads to more violence and to the greedy son’s death. The grief-stricken ensemble appeared stranded between worlds, repeatedly touching their hands to heart then head and pointing heavenwards. Venu scribed on the ground, drawing circles as if connecting memories as cycles of time.
“In another time… I was a daughter… I was a wife… And then a mother.”
An awe-inspiring production, in which Khan and his company delicately yet triumphantly balanced the subtle art of suggestion with dramatics. The questions were clear: why would brothers, born of the same womb, choose such disparate paths? Was Gandhari’s insurmountable anger and grief partly to blame? Her reflections on the devastating consequences of war could have been intended to provoke our own reflections about our roles in the current messy state of world affairs.
