Recently, at the Joyce Theatre, I attended a war. The war was a dance, “Gigenis: The Generation of the Earth,” directed by the British dancer and choreographer Akram Khan, loosely inspired by the story of Queen Gandhari, from the ancient Hindu epic the Mahabharata, who miraculously produced a hundred sons only for them all to be killed in battle. “Gigenis” was danced by seven exponents of Indian classical traditions (including Khan), accompanied by seven musicians. Khan, whose family is from Bangladesh, was trained both in the Indian classical dance form Kathak and in contemporary Western techniques. As a child, he performed in Peter Brook’s legendary 1985 theatrical adaptation of the Mahabharata, and he has since made several dances on themes or stories from the epic. Working with his London-based company and elsewhere (notably, the English National Ballet), he has often melded Kathak and Western dance.

But in “Gigenis” he has shifted course. Feeling that something was missing from contemporary dance, he turned back to Indian classical dance, in search of a way, as he recently told an interviewer, “not to act, but to be.” In the past few years, he and Mavin Khoo (a performer of Bharatanatyam, another Indian dance form) convened a series of residencies in India, Sri Lanka, and Britain for soloists in classical Indian dance, drama, and music. “Gigenis” (which returns to the U.S. next month) grew out of this process, and Khan is careful to note that, although he directed the work, the choreography was made collectively.

What emerged is a seventy-minute dance about the life of a woman who is also a queen: girlhood and love, marriage and motherhood, the death of a husband in war, and the loss of one son at the hands of another. And although the title suggests earthly renewal, the dance documents a timeless cycle of violence, rivalry, and vengeance.