Akram Khan and Company
The Joyce Theater
New York, New York
February 12, 2025
GIGENIS, the generation of the Earth
Preeti Vasudevan
There comes a time in life when you are given a blank page to write on! It’s a classic cliché: you stare at the page, scratch your head, wonder where to begin, go on a nostalgic ride… and then the chaos begins!! You need to tell your story…
What is my story? How do I tell it? Do I belong? Am I part of your tribe? And anyway, … who is going to be interested in it?
(l-r) Mythili Prakash, Akram Khan, and Mavin Khoo
in “GIGENIS, the generation of the Earth”
Photo by Camilla Greenwell
Stories need a catalyst. You can’t simply sit down one day and decide ‘oh well, I am now going to tell you my story’. Your story needs to come from an emotion that causes questions – even as simple as this one: My cat dies, I feel an emotion rising…and now, I am going to tell you about Jeffrey, my dead cat! Someone far away is going to read it and feel for their lost cat. The two of us, culturally and geographically apart, now share that emotion of loss and feel connected – a universal experience through a personal narrative.
Stories are really about that. The stir of an emotion caused by unexpected or eventual shifts in the world within and around us, however small or large and then shared amongst others.
Mythili Prakash (center) and GIGENIS Company
in Akram Khan’s “GIGENIS, the generation of the Earth”
Photo by Camilla Greenwell
Back in 2005, my grandmother told me ‘Preeti, it is Kali Yuga. I will be long gone before the real chaos happens. You will have to deal with it. It is your story now’. Its 20 years since. Little did I know that I was the generation living during the last of the mega epochs of time in Hindu mythology – the Kali Yuga – the time of heightened chaos and destruction. It’s the ultimate Star Wars of our times. In some manner we will all die, and a new dawn will begin, with or without us. The cosmic cycle will continue, as we humans are mere blips. We are in a big shift now! The blank page stares at you!
GIGENIS Company
in Akram Khan’s “GIGENIS, the generation of the Earth”
Photo by Camilla Greenwell
So, why do we tell our story? Are we relevant? Are we merely existing or dynamically living?
‘Existing’ is passive, accepting life as its given and normalizing any shift for fear of losing comfort and routine. But ‘living’ calls for active participation in our environment – there is no room to simply accept what is given. Change is part of the human story – our relevance is about change; the fiercely personal and lived story of the individual resonates across the borders into a universal and collective experience. It awakens emotions and has the power to start a revolution.
Kapila Venu and Mavin Khoo
in Akram Khan’s “GIGENIS”
Photo by Maxime Dos
When I saw GIGENIS, the generation of the Earth (GIGENIS), choreographer Akram Khan’s latest production, I was reeling like my fellow Americans in the Kali Yuga of our times – a new government unleashing its agenda not just on the US but the rest of the world. It was so rapid that it caught almost everyone off guard. We were lost in a no man’s land – a space belonging neither here nor there, of revolt and submission, of anger and passivity, of counter revolt and disbelief. In other words, we were stuck in the liminal space, a threshold where rules were subverted, challenged, questioned and all was fair game. This is our stir of emotion, of the shifts that cause us to tell our collective stories through individual experience.
The creator of GIGENIS, Akram Khan, is one of the leading 21st century choreographers bridging eastern and western aesthetics in dance. I have now known Akram for 23 years. I first interviewed him in 2002 which began a fast and long friendship filled with its own roller-coaster of emotions as we both were charting our own journeys as passionate creatives. We are both classically trained (he in Kathak and I in Bharatanatyam), Indian (he is British Asian and I am Indian from India), and cross trained in our artistic disciplines.
GIGENIS Company
in Akram Khan’s “GIGENIS”
Photo by Maxime Dos
In these 23 years, I have experienced most of Akram’s works, seen him become the golden boy of dance, watched dancers mesmerized by his speed and precision melding the bravura of both Indian classical and contemporary western dance, and had insight into his inner journey through the narratives of each production that he has created.
With GIGENIS, Akram tells his latest story – a story that is his and not actually his. That blank page that he has stared at and waited for that chaos to consume him to begin writing.
Akram was born in the UK of Bangladeshi parents. Learning Kathak would bring him closer to being accepted by the classicists in India, but not really. India is tough. The soil there makes it the world’s oldest vessel of creativity and exchange. Its seen everything as the world’s oldest potpourri. It created some of the world’s oldest religions, and then exported them. It invented martial arts and then exported them. Now, it’s about the CEOs of the world’s largest corporate markets. Modern India especially doesn’t care about western affirmation, as it once did. So, to be accepted by India is to be part of the tribe.
Renjith Babu and Vijna Vasudevan
in Akram Khan’s “GIGENIS”
Photo by Maxime Dos
But as we all know, being part of a tribe is not for the fainthearted. Most often you are embraced yet not fully accepted. Akram’s journey has been that. He is dearly loved and lauded, but not yet part of the tribe. So, like the role he played in Peter Brook’s Mahabharata when he was 13 (or like his very first opportunity as Mowgli in a 1984 version of The Jungle Book in the UK), he belongs everywhere and nowhere. He represents a generation that shares this space in between, the kind of narrative we all live in today – everywhere and nowhere.
GIGENIS combines a group of Indian classical dancers and actors. In particular, there is a love for south Indian arts in this work – a training Akram has never had. This love, possibly through his dear friend and colleague Mavin Khoo (whom I have known even longer – a deeply sensitive and lyrical dancer), and eventually through other talented performers, has inspired Akram to form a caravanserai – a contemporary Silkroad of performers with musicians, designers and dancers who share and narrate a new tale stemming from old ones.
Akram Khan and Kapila Venu
in “GIGENIS, the generation of the Earth”
Photo by Camilla Greenwell
This new Silkroad is led by possibly the most stunning performer from South India – a natural born storyteller imbibing her art from generations of great family storytellers – an ancient form of theater called Koodiyattam from south-western India (Kerala). A shy and quiet person by nature, she comes into full force on stage and transports you to a metaverse of tales and emotions.
Kapila Venu in Akram Khan’s
“GIGENIS, the generation of the Earth”
Photo by Camilla Greenwell
Meet Kapila Venu. She time travels in GIGENIS, reliving her youth, marriage, motherhood, loss of loved ones and eventual surrender to the game of life.
It’s a simple script. A woman’s tale, as is documented in many ballads through cultures and history – innocence, maturity, loss, and spiritual awakening. The blossoming girl becomes the timeless matriarch. She narrates her story surrounded by the sound of life – seven incredible musicians who create another world for her (and us) – almost raw and tantric, comparable to the unleashing of the kundalini (a spiritual energy or life force).
Kapila Venu
in Akram Khan’s “GIGENIS”
Photo by Maxime Dos
Embellishing her are the other dancers – six others, all classically trained in Indian dance. They are like the Greek chorus supporting, commenting, role playing and weaving the story that is hers. In the unfolding of the woman’s story lies the greed of a young man and the benevolence of his brother – two factions forming good and evil, confirmed and confused, troubled and awakened. This perfect chaos caused by one brother is balanced by the other. The destruction unleashed by the first gives room for regeneration by the other.
The Kali Yuga in our current world is unfolded on the stage, merging time and space into a universal human story – ours! The dim lighting, making you grapple with the absent spaces leads your mind to question the interconnectedness between all of us as we collectively experience dramatic change around us. The throbbing fingers symbolizing intense tremors, the staccato group movements against more lyrical duets contrasting love and aggression – each time-bound relationship ultimately fragments into a multinarrative kaleidoscope held together by the lone matriarch’s story. We are taken through the journey of this lone woman and the cosmic sounds that surround her – reminding us that a fiercely personal story can resonate within each of us, forming a human bond.
Akram Khan (center),
foreground (l-r) Mythili Prakash and Mavin Khoo,
and background, musician Rajeev Padiparampil
In “GIGENES, the generation of the Earth”
Photo by Maxime Dos
Like a timeless ballad GIGENIS brings through tales of mythology and the past into the present – it marries the unraveling of the lone matriarch into the stormy waters of our current times, where we seek the matriarch to hold our story together, to give it meaning and overcome the exhaustion taking over the rest of the people. The crown desired by the greedy young man in GIGENIS reflects the modern American political tale with the woman pushed aside even though she birthed him.
An ancient tale, personalized, now reflects a universal one, for its that stir of the emotion through unexpected shifts in the world that brings us all together – the human experience through a personal narrative. The page is complete!
Preeti Vasudevan is an award-winning New York based cultural storyteller and thought leader exploring individual identity and the critical role of arts in the expression of the individual’s story in a global society. A critically acclaimed choreographer, Preeti’s provocative and unconventional storytelling challenges the status quo of dance-theater, bridging ancient traditions with the contemporary world.
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