Reviewed by:

• The Jungle Book Reimaginedby Tariq Jordan
• Alexandra A. Rego

The Jungle Book Reimaginedpremiered at the Curve (Leicester, UK) in 2022 and has since toured internationally, with further performances booked through January 2025 (Alhambra Theatre, Bradford, UK) at the time of writing. In a 2021 conversation with writer Amitav Ghosh (on "Art, Storytelling, and the Environment") and in numerous journalistic interviews since, director and choreographer Akram Khan relayed his daughter's insistence both on a genderswapped Mowgli and on a production that in effect practiced the ecocritical concerns it preached. Khan and his company went to great lengths to limit the production's carbon footprint, from their sets and props to their rehearsal spaces. The production thus traveled relatively light—the set was composed of various cardboard boxes arranged into specific towers and architectural configurations. Each performance venue involved a new set of boxes taken from local recycling bins and sometimes from storage from the theatre. The linear animations, voiceovers, and Jocelyn Pook's atmospheric, earthy score were transferred and stored digitally.

"There was a jungle," one of the wolves recalled in passing, "but nobody knows when the jungle was, anymore." Indeed, the production opened in water and skyscraper ruins (animated by YeastCulture's Adam Smith and Nick Hillel), in a world where global catastrophic flooding drove inland migration from every coast. Views of animal and human migration, heavy rains, and rising sea levels provided glimpses of various cities before they vanished under the water: the Kremlin, the Oriental Pearl Tower, Big Ben, and the Empire State Building appeared only briefly. This ambiguity elided, or perhaps erased, both temporal and geographic specificity. The scenes of global flooding barely offered enough time to positively identify and locate particular landmarks, let alone time enough to consider where it was that Mowgli washed ashore. These landmarks rose and fell, etched in white light upon a dark green, nearly black backdrop.

Amid this catastrophic milieu, pseudojournalistic reports detailed rising sea levels and corporate profiteering, interspersed with audio clips of climate activist Greta Thunberg. The fact that the production is in the process of an international tour complicated this temporal and geographic ambiguity somewhat: the sight, however brief, of the Empire State Building stirred fellow New Yorkers in the audience. The Jungle Book Reimaginedhad an intriguing relationship with time: it was unclear if the disembodied news reports came from a nearpast or an ongoing present; whether initial animated footage of Mowgli (danced by Pui Yung Shum) and her fellow Indigenous climate refugees served as a preamble or the first chapter.

The production refrained from directly naming its location, troubling any simplistic or total reliance on geographical, architectural, interpersonal, or cultural signifiers. By the time Mowgli arrived on dry land, one might be forgiven for waiting, time and again, for the titular "jungle" to arrive. The animals we are popularly familiar with—Bagheera, Baloo, Kaa—emerged, but from a tangled array of scaffolding and cardboard that supplanted Kipling's dense vegetation. The animals included escaped zoo and circus captives, laboratory subjects, and domesticated pets who made a kind of jungle in the wreckage of an emptied, waterlogged city. The Bandarlog's assembly may have mimicked the House of Parliament (or similar parliamentary governments), and many of the voiceover actors were from the United Kingdom, but Khan's Mowgli certainly did not come from the same place, having traveled across a sea or an ocean to arrive there.

Khan's restitution of Kipling's work acknowledges and problematizes this geographic ambiguity. Jocelyn Pook's atmospheric score and lines delivered in voiceover never arrived in tandem with corresponding choreography. Tracking and attributing specific lines to specific characters (with specific movement categories tracked more easily than their spoken names) offered an unusual temporal framework in which dialogue and its associated narrative began to exist along a different musical and rhythmic timeline than individual characters' movements, instrumental scoring, and the animation. The production's relationship with spoken language also gestured to...

 校订者：

• 
  塔里克·乔丹 （Tariq Jordan） 重新构想的《丛林之书》
•  亚历山德拉·雷戈

《丛林之书：重新构想》于 2022 年在 Curve（英国莱斯特）首演，此后进行了国际巡演，在撰写本文时，进一步的演出将预订到 2025 年 1 月（英国布拉德福德阿尔罕布拉剧院）。在 2021 年与作家 Amitav Ghosh 的对话（关于“艺术、讲故事和环境”）以及此后的多次新闻采访中，导演兼编舞 Akram Khan 转述了他女儿对性别互换的 Mowgli 和实际上实践其所宣扬的生态批判性关注的作品的坚持。Khan 和他的公司不遗余力地限制了从布景和道具到排练空间的碳足迹。因此，这部作品相对轻松——布景由各种纸板箱组成，这些纸板箱排列成特定的塔楼和建筑配置。每个表演场地都涉及从当地回收箱中取出的一组新盒子，有时还从剧院的仓库中取出。线性动画、画外音和 Jocelyn Pook 大气、朴实的配乐都以数字方式传输和存储。

“那里有一片丛林，”其中一只狼顺便回忆道，“但现在已经没有人知道这片丛林是什么时候了。事实上，该作品在水和摩天大楼废墟中开始（由 YeastCulture 的 Adam Smith 和 Nick Hillel 制作动画），当时全球灾难性洪水驱使来自各个海岸的内陆移民。动物和人类迁徙、暴雨和海平面上升的景色让人们得以一瞥各个城市在消失在水下之前：克里姆林宫、东方明珠塔、大本钟和帝国大厦只短暂出现。这种模糊性忽略了，或者说可能抹去了时间和地理的特殊性。全球洪水的现场几乎没有提供足够的时间来积极识别和定位特定的地标，更不用说有足够的时间考虑毛克利被冲上岸的位置了。这些地标起伏，在深绿色、近乎黑色的背景上蚀刻在白光中。

在这种灾难性的环境中，伪新闻报道详细描述了海平面上升和企业暴利，并穿插了气候活动家格蕾塔·桑伯格 （Greta Thunberg） 的音频剪辑。该剧正在进行国际巡演，这在一定程度上使这种时间和地理的模糊性复杂化：帝国大厦的景象，无论多么短暂，都激起了观众中的纽约同胞。《重新构想的丛林之书》与时间有着耐人寻味的关系：目前尚不清楚这些无形的新闻报道是来自近处的过去还是正在进行的现在;Mowgli（由 Pui Yung Shum 跳舞）和她的土著气候难民同伴的最初动画镜头是作为序言还是第一章。

该作品没有直接命名其地点，这让任何对地理、建筑、人际关系或文化符号的简单化或完全依赖都感到不安。当莫克利到达陆地时，人们一次又一次地等待名义上的“丛林”到来可能是可以原谅的。我们通常熟悉的动物——Bagheera、Baloo、Kaa——出现于一排错综复杂的脚手架和纸板中，取代了吉卜林茂密的植被。这些动物包括逃跑的动物园和马戏团的俘虏、实验室实验对象和驯养的宠物，它们在空旷、积水的城市废墟中形成了一种丛林。班达洛格的集会可能模仿了议会大厦（或类似的议会政府），许多配音演员都来自英国，但可汗的莫克利肯定不是来自同一个地方，他们穿越了海洋或海洋到达那里。

汗对吉卜林作品的归还承认了这种地理模糊性，并提出了问题。Jocelyn Pook 大气的配乐和画外音台词从未与相应的编舞同步出现。跟踪特定台词并将其归因于特定角色（特定动作类别比他们的口语名称更容易跟踪）提供了一个不寻常的时间框架，其中对话及其相关叙述开始沿着与单个角色的动作、乐器配乐和动画不同的音乐和节奏时间线存在。该作品与口语的关系也表明......