A woman advances out of the darkness and begins to move her arms with violent force, as if slashing and stabbing an opponent we can’t see. She reaches down, seemingly pulling out her victim’s entrails and holding them over her face, which is contorted in a masklike grimace.

This is the terrifying opening to the choreographer Akram Khan’s “Gigenis: The Generation of the Earth” (2024), coming to the Joyce Theater this week. The piece is a loosely inspired, pared-down version of the story of Gandhari from the Indian epic the Mahabharata. Gandhari, a queen, loses her sons in a brutal war brought on by their outsize ambitions. In “Gigenis,” which Khan both directed and performs in, he plays one of the sons, killed by his brother.

It is a story, Khan said, that hits close to home. “I mean, the world is in a state of war,” he said in a phone interview from London, where he lives with his wife and three young children. “We just don’t know it, or we choose not to acknowledge it.”

“We try not to talk about it because it just ruins the day,” he added.

“Gigenis,” whose title refers to a tribe of giants in ancient Greek myth, is a dark work for a dark time. But it’s also one that brings Khan, 50, back to a story he has engaged with since his earliest days as a performer. At just 13, he was cast in Peter Brook’s nine-hour stage production of the Mahabharata. “It changed my life and the way I saw the world,” said Khan, whose family is from Bangladesh. He has since made a handful of pieces, including “Gnosis” (2009) and “Until the Lions” (2016), that deal with themes from the Mahabharata.

One of the lessons he said he took from Brook is an interest in universality. “The loss of a child,” Khan said, “no matter what culture you are from, you can at least identify with it.”

The other is a desire to tap into storytelling and genuine expression, or as he said, “not to act, but to be.” It was something he said he had found missing recently in contemporary dance, his arena since the late ’90s. (He has also worked in ballet; his 2016 reimagining of “Giselle” was a hit for the English National Ballet.) Recently, though, he said he felt drawn back to classical Indian dance, which he trained in as a child in London and in India. It is a tradition rich in stories.