Colours opens with an Akram Khan premiere: Gauthier Dance in Turning of Bones

Theaterhaus, Stuttgart
June 26, 2025

Stuttgart’s Colours International Dance Festival had already got underway with several events in the city, before the main Theaterhaus programmed opened with home company Gauthier Dance in the world premiere of Akram Khan’s Turning of Bones, a co-production with the festival and Orsolina28 Art Foundation.

The 55-minute work is the choreographer’s first ever full-length piece for a German dance company. In his traditional opening chat to the audience, artistic director Eric Gauthier made no secret of the fact it will likely change the international perception of Gauthier Dance, and its sixteen dancers. And those dancers are seriously terrific in what Gauthier reckons is the most difficult work they have ever performed.

In the highlands of Madagascar, approximately every seven years, Merina and northern Betsileo families periodically organise ceremonies called famadihana. It’s a means of honouring the dead but also very much a celebration in which tombs are opened, bodies exhumed and wrapped in new silk, the participants conversing and dancing joyfully with the newly wrapped remains as they are taken back to their resting place. There’s also usually a lot of good food and alcohol!

In Turning of Bones, Akram Khan digs up his own choreographic bones and, with the aid of the superb Gauthier Dance dancers, gives them a good shake before rearranging them. The work brings together motifs and moments from Khan’s Jungle Book, Mud of Sorrow, Desh, ItMoi and Insirgents, pieces that he feels have been at the forefront of his thinking throughout his career.

Those five works deal with humankind’s relationship to the Earth, life and death, humanity and the search for identity. As he places them in a new, contemporary context, Khan says Turning of Bones reflects how he feels right now. And it is very much a new work, not some sort of retrospective collection of excerpts. While a few familiar moments remain visible, most obviously the drawing of a second face on a man’s bald head as seen in Desh, most of what has been taken is totally transformed, helped by it all being placed in a new narrative arc.

Turning of Bones all takes place in a vast cave, created cleverly with drapes that encircle the stage, and a place inhabited by terracotta warriors, frozen in time. Into this cavern comes Tuti Cedeño, a traveller. She’s accompanied by Stefano Gallelli, whose role is not entirely clear. There are suggestions that they are lovers, although that doesn’t square with the programme note, which very clearly tells us that she has journeyed alone for so long that she has forgotten what it means to be human. Maybe it’s better to see him as some sort of guide who has decided to show her the hidden army. Whatever, the couple’s presence acts as a trigger for the warriors to slowly come to life.

Karnatic music virtuoso and soundscape designer Aditya Prakash’s opening earthy, elemental foreboding rumbles set the tone for what is to come. Led by the demonic Giovanni Visone, the army dance with an ancient ritualistic fervour. They are menacing, threatening. They feel like some sort of cult who are not going to be stopped until they get what they want. They are seriously scary.

In Gudrun Schretzmeier’s beautifully understated green and blue Indian-inspired costumes, the ensemble sweeps back and forth across the stage. The movement itself is drawn from various styles, although the kathak influences are the most obvious. But more than anything else, the work succeeds because of its intense theatricality and the power of its story and themes.

Lines and patterns form, break and reform anew, Feet stomp and arms whirl, torsos arc backwards, all to great effect. As the tension builds, the power of the group is tremendous. One section that draws on martial arts is especially dramatic. Elements do repeat, but not so much as to become overly noticeable.

A very special stone is there right from the start. Initially in the hands of the army’s leader, it smokes ominously, very clearly showing it has special powers. As Turning of Bones runs its course, you increasingly feel that something awful is going to happen. Sure enough, it does. But even so, the demise of Gallelli, and how it is done, shocks.

Reflecting afterwards, it’s impossible not to read Turning of Bones as a commentary on today’s world, as a meditation on power. The arrogance of power. The power of a leader on a group. The power a group can exert on an individual. And if there’s a message, it’s that even the strongest of power, even in the most fearsome of circumstances, does not have to be submitted to.

It ends with Cedeño, our traveller, deciding to leave, preferring to be alone rather than remain with the army. And if they are what being human means, who can blame her.

Colours International Dance Festival continues to July 13, 2025.