Strength and surrender

Of the innumerable artistic interpretations of the Mahabharata, few are able to truly capture the pure and timeless essence of the epic, unhindered by the relevance of the characters or episodes. ‘Gigenis’ directed by Akram Khan, with a stellar artist ensemble, traced a trajectory of innocence, love, loss and despair, that was precise in its vision, and phantasmagorical in terms of its ability to transport the audience. A production that has travelled to some of the most iconic art venues across the world, Gigenis premiered in India, at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, Mumbai, in early April. It was a rare coming together of storytelling and skill, of music and movement, and artistic strength and surrender.

An intriguing phenomenon called ‘crown shyness’ is observed in forests, where individual crown branches of canopies create spectacularly intricate patterns with precise gaps between them without overlap, to access essential light. The sharing of space by the artists of Gigenis reminded one of an extraordinary visual of crown shyness atop a beautiful canopy of trees, with patches of the sky visible in the gaps between them.

Seven artists from the Indian classical dance fraternity, Kapila Venu, Mavin Khoo, Mythili Prakash, Renjith Babu, Vijna Vasudevan and Sirikalyani Adkoli, led by Akram Khan, and nine musicians, B C Manjunath, Chitra Poornima Sathish, Hariraam Lam, Nina Harries, Rajeev Kalamandalam, Rohith Jayaraman, Sohini Alam and Sushma Soma, led by Jyotsna Prakash, collectively actualised the brilliant artistic vision of Gigenis. Each of the artists, with an established niche and exemplar in their own right, had a definitive role and contribution to a singular vision.

A solo improvisation of war slaughter and its aftermath, deliberate and elaborate, drew the audience right into the premise of the production. A non-linear and layered storytelling from a woman's perspective took the audience along, as she walked through some pivotal moments from her memory of life. A girl, a wife and a mother in the past, and an elderly queen in the now, she segues between her past and present. She not only recollects, but relives the innocence of girlhood, the exuberance of youth and love, and the complex emotions as she traverses and witnesses birth, greed, loss, grief and despair in her life, against a backdrop of war.

While traditional dance forms, Kutiyattam, Kathak, Odissi and Bharatanatyam, and world music from multiple origins, were presented outside of their typical repertoire, the authentic choices of attributes from these traditional forms shone with relevance. The storytelling tapped into the classical vocabulary, retaining their original ethos, but amalgamated them into a contemporary narrative.

There were several exceptional instances of this: A powerful usage of hand gestures to show the crown, as it becomes the object of brewing greed between the brothers; a whirl of chakkars to show the frenzy of chaotic power; the joy of movement to bring forth innocence and love; the stillness latent in abhinaya to portray the slow transformation of brotherhood to feud and then to war. The narrative allowed the depth of complexity to play out to diverse perceptions, without morally reducing the characters to archetypes, thereby inviting the audience to live and breathe in the universe that was Gigenis.

Gigenis is a production with a process as phenomenal as the performance. “We were in Italy and then in the South of France all together, the composer, musicians, dancers, sound designer, lighting designer, all working in the same space. I believe strongly that this is the most profound way to work, where one genre can feed off the other. And what transpires is a sort of intertwining process, where eventually the many genres become inseparable to support the main narrative”, shared Akram Khan, the visionary behind Gigenis.

Speaking about the process of the different parts of the music coalescing into the bigger scheme of the production, he further added, “The music was created in parallel to the choreography. What’s special about this process is that we were all creating in the same space. So this was a huge advantage.”

A handful of thoughts and phrases shared by the artists of Gigenis in the post-performance discussion on stage reflected the exceptional environment in which the work was built: “Indian classical speaks in the present tense”, “to find the epicness in the smallest detail” and another saying “music is a choreography on its own."

The concept note of Gigenis starts with a quote by Akram Khan, “In modern thinking, we are often taught that we must see it to believe it. However, in the past, my grandparents felt that we must believe in it, to see it”. Every atom of the process of Gigenis aligns and adheres to this tenet.