Like many ambitious artistshellokittyvip, the British choreographer Akram Khan can confuse impact with magnitude. His opera-house productions often suffer from bloat. Even if he didn’t have personal connections to the Indian epic the Mahabharata — he appeared in Peter Brook’s mammoth production while a teenager — the subject might have tempted him by its sheer size.
Yet “Gigenis: The Generation of the Earth,” his 2024 adaptation of a story line from the Mahabharata, is domestic in scale, fitting nicely onto the stage of the Joyce Theater, where it had its United States premiere on Wednesday. Inspired by the tale of Gandhari, a mother who loses her 100 sons in an epic-size war, the work reduces the son count to a Cain-and-Abel-like pair, illuminating the age-old themes of the seduction of power and the cyclical nature of violence by focusing tightly on the mother and her grief. It is Khan’s most potent effort in years.
It is also a welcome return to his roots in Indian classical dance. Khan, who trained in Kathak as a young man, has gathered expert dancers and musicians in other classical forms, like Bharatanatyam and Odissi. The choreography is collective and hybrid. Khan serves as director and plays one of the sons.
ImageAkram Khan in “Gigenis,” which signals a return to his roots in classical Indian dance.Credit...Rachel Papo for The New York TimesThe star is Kapila Venu, who plays the mother figure. The story is told from her perspective, in memory after the worst has happened, as in Martha Graham’s modern-dance treatments of Oedipus and the Oresteia. She silently recalls her youth and courtship, the death of her husband and the murderous rivalry of her sons, as those episodes are enacted by the other six dancers.
Venu is a master of Kutiyattam,fef777 cassino an ancient storytelling form that usually involves highly elaborate makeup and costumes. Here she is stripped of those theatrical tools. No matter. In an early, tone-setting solo, she conjures violence as an elemental force — cutting and stabbing invisible enemies, slitting her own throat. Somehow she seems to swell, like the Incredible Hulk. Her eyes bulge, their whites expanding, their pupils shrinking. This is terrifying.
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When police officers arrived, Ms. Lee, 25, refused to let them into her apartment and threatened to stab one of them. An officer then rammed through the locked front door, according to body camera footage released by the New Jersey attorney general’s office. As officers yelled “drop the knife,” Ms. Lee moved forward and the officer fired his gun.
Our small talk — about our fondness for the cityhellokittyvip, receiving Pulitzer Prizes the same year (in 2022) and being college professors — gave way to weightier issues: gentrification, ghosts and intergenerational trauma. Those subjects are all explored in “Good Bones,” his much-anticipated follow-up to his Tony-nominated “Fat Ham,” a Pulitzer winner about a Hamlet-inspired character’s struggles to overcome his family’s cycles of trauma and violence.