Rudyard Kipling’s cultural footprint is a whole lot bigger in Great Britain than on this side of the Atlantic, and Graham Lustig grew up well-ensconced in a realm shaped by the writer’s imagination. As a boy in London, the budding dancer often escaped the city’s fog and bustle going on camping trips with the Boy Scouts, an organization inspired partly by Kipling’s “Jungle Book” stories.

“I was a cub in the Boy Scouts, and the leader of the pack is the Akela,” said Lustig, Oakland Ballet’s artistic director, referring to the “Jungle Book” wolf who helps oversee the feral boy Mowgli’s upbringing. “That mythology was part of my childhood. I knew the stories and the characters.”

Lustig drew on his deep affinity for Kipling’s tale in his family-friendly dance theater production “Jangala,” which is distilled from several “Jungle Book” stories (which are set in India). But rather than simply transferring beloved characters from page to stage, he reimagines the tale by mingling contemporary ballet with elements of bharatanatyam, the South Indian classical dance form.

“I was fascinated that no one had approached ‘Jungle Book’ from an Indian arts perspective,” he said, adding that his many treasured experiences in India while dancing with the Royal Ballet contributed to the project. “I have very strong and beautiful memories, like meeting Ravi Shankar at his house. Growing up in London with a lot of Indian communities around me I was drawn to Indian arts and culture.”

Oakland Ballet Company presents the Bay Area premiere Lustig’s “Jangala” on March 10 at Oakland’s Skyline High School Performing Arts Center and March 13 at the Castro Valley High School Performing Arts Center. The piece premiered at New Jersey’s Middlesex County College in 2013.

The hope is that “Jangala” becomes part of Oakland Ballet’s regular repertoire, providing a vivid point of entry for young audiences. For these performances, the company is joined by bharatanatyam dancer Nadhi Thekkek in the role of Mowgli’s human mother, Messua. Her San Francisco company, Nava Dance Theatre, opens the performance with a newly commissioned narrative dance work in the bharatanatyam tradition, created for these performances and featuring live music.

In reimagining Kipling’s tale, Lustig moves the action from one jungle to another, setting “Jangala” in a chaotic urban landscape marked by discos, junkyards and construction sites. With a cast of 11 female and five male dancers, the piece features New Delhi-born Ailey School alumnus Sanchit Babbar in the lead role of Mowgli. The recorded score draws on energetic bhangra and Bollywood music as well as classical ragas and folkloric music from across India.

Rather than using elaborate masks, Lustig wanted to emphasize the contemporary setting. “It’s an urban jungle with everyone wearing suits,” he says. “The characters start to emerge through movement. The beautiful thing is that bharatanatyam is this 2,000-year-old southern dance style with a hand gesture to become a wolf, a head gesture to become a tiger.”

Details: 2:30 p.m. March 10, Skyline High School Performing Arts Center, 12250 Skyline Blvd., Oakland; and 7 p.m. March 13, Castro Valley High School Performing Arts Center, 19501 Redwood Rd., Castro Valley; $15-50; 510-893-3132, oaklandballet.org.

Recommended

SF Performances presents British choreographer Wayne McGregor’s latest work “Autobiography,” an evening-length work partly inspired by the information gleaned from getting his DNA sequenced. The piece pairs 23 formative experiences/memories with the 23 chromosomes, offering another step in his ongoing work enfolding dance, science, technology, philosophy, and current events within his kinetic movement vocabulary.

Details: 7:30 p.m. March 8-10; YCBA Theater, 700 Howard St., San Francisco; $40-$65; 415-392-2545; sfperformances.org.

Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.