The sun is pounding down on patrons entering the cavernous Adelaide Festival Centre. They’ll spend the next two hours held in the cool embrace of Jungle Book reimagined while the show, choreographed by Akram Khan, illustrates a near-future drowning world, brought on by climate change. Based on Rudyard Kipling’s classic novel, this re-imagining boasts innovative visual technologies smack right up against the old-school puppetry of dancers turning plain boxes into giant snakes. They build both emotional and visual depth with thoughtful animations on seemingly invisible membranes on the front and back of the stage, bracketing the dancers who transform their bodies through the animal kingdom. 

Dancers seems an understatement, though. The story of Mowgli, recast as a young girl washed up in a ruined citadel of the Global North, and her chosen animal family fills the stage with such precise bestial embodiments that you’re convinced the performers really are dancing bears, wolves, escaped lab chimps, and panthers. They share small moments of levity in this script filled with loss, as they chat and joke while Mowgli stays silent. She cannot speak to the animals in their own tongue, but she can find connection with them through persistence and sincere curiosity about their ways. This Jungle Book is a gorgeous, affecting search for meaning, disarmament and a way to move through the consequences of our human actions on this earth. 

Jungle Book reimagined, Adelaide Festival Centre, run ended.