Akram Khan, GIGENIS, The Generation of the Earth, Sadler's Wells

On of the foremost choreographers working today, Akram Khan has shown a special talent for blending contemporary dance with the kathak of his roots in India. In his immensely successful version of Giselle for English National Ballet he went even further and used a choreographic language taken primarily from classical ballet to brilliant effect.

Now, though, Khan is back with a brand new work, which takes him all the way back to his roots: GIGENIS, The Generation of the Earth. It premiered in the summer at the Aix-en-Provence festival and will have its UK premiere at Sadler's Wells this autumn.

Having retired from full-length solo performances a few years ago with Xenos, his homage to the colonial soldiers who fought alongside the Allies in World War I, Khan, himself a mesmerising dancer, continues to feel the pull of the stage, and he is joining six other dancers and seven musicians to perform a work based entirely on Indian dance forms. Among the dancers are his regular collaborators Mavin Khoo and the American Mythili Prakash, both bharatanatyam specialists. Other dancers represent several other strands of Indian classical dance.

GIGENIS is based on an episode of the Indian epic The Mahabharata. Simply put, a war widow is faced with two feuding sons: one stands for harmony, the other, danced by Khan, for chaos.

Here's the trailer: