The public at the Liceu yesterday approached with great expectation this beautiful danced and multimedia representation that Akram Khan has created of the Jungle Book, perhaps the international choreographer who has been able to approach the iconic story of Rudyard Kipling with the greatest affinity. Both due to the geographical proximity of their respective origins – Khan's parents emigrated to England from Bangladesh and the Nobel Prize winner was born in Bombay, under British rule – and due to his already manifest sensitivity to everything related to life in communion with nature and respect for other species. Those one-on-one relationships with the animal kingdom in a truly global village.
Like someone who gathers around a bonfire to evoke a fable from another world that, learned in childhood, whether from a book or from Disney, remains unchanged in the imaginary of various generations, the high school public - increasingly convinced of the beauties of dance– he attended a show in which elephants, giraffes, rhinos, birds and other specimens of animated cartoons interact on stage with the dancers or, rather, with the characters they characterize: Mowgli, the wolves, Bagheera the panther, Baloo the bear, the conclave of monkeys... or that snake formed by a trail of cardboard boxes that advances with undulating movements.
It would be difficult to find a more advanced example of techno-analogue stage art than this Jungle Book Reimagined ('The Jungle Book Reimagined') that Akram Khan defines as a dansical, that is, dance theater, equivalent to the musical. In this production riddled with magical moments but without a stage direction that knows how to keep up, link scenes and not spoil the crescendos, dramaturgy, voice-over dialogues -perhaps too many-, light and sound effects -in great luxury- coexist. of onomatopoeia linked to each species, such as the sibylline crackling of the snake's tongue–, in addition to schematic cartoon lines with which a changing scenery is built.
And all this with the impressive work of movement: ten dancers give life to multiple animals, and develop a sixth sense to move as similar to each species, as Lucía Chocarro, the only Spaniard from Akram Khan's company, explains. And in the case of Mowgli, the young Filipina Jan Mikaela Villanueva who defends the main character is perhaps little exploited on stage. You have to wait for the ensemble dance of the second part to see her in her moment of glory.
The rise of the waters caused by climate change is here at the origin of the story... Because in this updated and "sustainable" montage, the couple who lose their son Mowgli –here daughter– are not fleeing from an attack of Shere Khan – the leader of the tigers in Kipling's fiction – but of the floods. And Bagheera and Baloo, who protect the girl, are in this legend the thinking minds who wonder what has happened to humans, a species they once got along with, and who could teach them to correct their destructive mentality. .
"Be careful, we can't control man's inventions!" warns one of them when the monkeys encourage Mowgli to create fire: "Teach us, we want to be the new dominant species!" they snapped at him.
“Akram Khan gives us three lessons – commented the artistic director of the Liceu to those attending the final drink –: one is ecological; another, the threat that humans represent to other species and coexistence with them, and the third is that in the long run it is that great family on the same planet that has to protect everything”. Khan's gesture is silent, but in reality it is a desperate cry of "wake up, time is running out!"
Among the public there were many spectators who expected to see more traditional dance, "and not those strange movements", and another who had loved it, but understood that "this is not a show for the Liceu". In any case, Khan is eager to get it in front of as many types of audiences as possible. And especially before that of an opera house.
