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Staging the Entangled Human–Natural–Technological Worlds in Jungle Book Reimagined

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2025

Jihay Park
Jihay Park*
Affiliation:
Department of English Language and Literature, Sungkyunkwan University , Seoul, South Korea
*
Email: jihay17@gmail.com
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Extract

The Jungle Book (1894) is a nineteenth-century book of children’s fables written by Rudyard Kipling. While the story is often criticized for its colonial overtures,1 this wolf story, as an antithesis to the modern separation of nature and humanity, introduces a romantic view of nature where it is represented as a source of renewal and wholeness. The fiction imagines an amicable relation between humans and other-than-human beings through the myth of child-raising wolves. In the face of worsening climate crisis, the wolf tale in Akram Khan’s Jungle Book Reimagined (2022) takes a step further and expresses contemporary fears of human extinction and environmental deterioration. Jungle Book Reimagined, a dance production that premiered at Curve Theatre in Leicester in 2022, has since been performed at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Théâtre du Châtelet, and multiple other theatres worldwide, and was also presented as a five-minute film at the Edinburgh International Culture Summit in 2022. The emancipatory life in the Anthropocene that the colonial fantasy envisages is adapted in Khan’s ecological makeover as a new mode of theatre situated within the broader narrative of the Anthropocene. Khan takes an ecocritical turn and reimagines Mowgli’s journey in a way that engages with Anthropocene thinking, imagining how the apocalyptic vision of the future of humanity would be different if we were more of a listener to the nonhuman world.

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Theatre Survey , Volume 66 , Issue 3 , September 2025 , pp. 345 - 362
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society for Theatre Research, Inc

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References

Notes

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2 This article is grounded in my firsthand experience with the production at the LG Arts Center in Seoul, South Korea, which took place during 18–19 November 2022.

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43 See https://yeastculture.org/animation/, accessed 2 June 2025; the images at 0:30 and 1:15 specifically are from Jungle Book Revisited.

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