For his first original story ballet, Akram Khan has chosen Macbeth—or rather Lady Macbeth. The celebrated kathak-to-contemporary Bangladeshi-British choreographer has swapped out the ambitious, dogged, eventually cowed husband for his more ruthless wife, except this time the Lady has reason beyond sheer ambition to kill the king. King Duncan takes after Shakespeare’s contemporary, the Scottish King James, who persecuted unhusbanded herbalists possessed of supernatural acumen—otherwise known as witches. In Khan’s version, Lady Macbeth is herself a seer. “She wants to kill the king to free the world from toxic masculinity.” The choreographer got his start onstage with sagas of bloody kings. In the late 1980s, the London teenager toured internationally with Peter Brook’s nine-hour Mahabharata, later a television miniseries, then a three-hour film. He partook in all its iterations—years in the making. For this Royal Danish Ballet production, Khan won the current ballet world equivalent of that extravagant commitment: three months in the studio with nine RDB principals. They have become more than the Royal Danish Ballet’s usual consummate dance-actors, he says. They have become the story, the script. —Apollinaire Scherr