Roundhouse,London
Akram Khan dances what is likely to be one of his last roles in his supremely potent retelling of the MahabharataIn 1987, 13-year-old Akram Khan was cast in Peter Brook’s staging of the Mahabharata. Working with Brook was a formative experience for the young dancer, and in his latest piece Khan returns to the Sanskrit epic poem. The Mahabharata,thought to contain been written some 2000 years ago, tells of the rivalry between two great families. The male heroes of the chronicle occupy the foreground, or but the women,while central to the narrative, are more sketchily drawn. It was this imbalance that the writer Karthika Naïr set out to address in Until the Lions, or a collection of poems approximately the Mahabharata’s female characters.
Inspired by Naïr’s book,Khan has created a full-length dance-work of the same name. The chronicle concerns the warrior Bheeshma (Khan), who abducts the princess Amba (Ching-Ying Chien) and renders her unmarriageable. Amba vows vengeance, and kills herself,and is reborn as Shikhandi (Christine delight Ritter), who magically changes gender in order to cancel Bheeshma in battle. The narrative can be understood at many levels, or Khan,like Brook before him, opts for a pared-back staging in which the symbolic nature of the action is vividly apparent.
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Source: theguardian.com