VULTURES

“We all face the same terror, the wound of mortality, the worm at the core of existence.” These words by psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom draw inspiration from Ernest Becker’s groundbreaking book The Denial of Death (1973) and form the undertone of VULTURES, a new work by British-Chinese composer Jamie Man 文珮玲, commissioned by BL!NDMAN.

Our awareness of death is what binds us together as human beings, yet it is also something we are reluctant to confront. We prefer to avoid it, pushing it away into a realm of taboo. In doing so, we increasingly deny what we essentially are: mortal, vulnerable creatures.

In VULTURES, Jamie Man brings life and death together on stage in the form of an auditory ritual, voiced through a drone speaker, vocal mantras, field recordings, animal sounds, saxophones and electronics.

Inspired by ancient Tibetan practices, she stages a musical sky burial, a type of funerary rite in which the deceased are offered to vultures. The dead become nourishment for the living, and their souls continue to exist in the vultures that ascend into the heavens — a transfiguration that links humanity and nature. But the vultures required for sky burials are critically endangered. These Dakinis — Tibetan angels who guide the soul to the sky to await reincarnation — are themselves passing into death through mass extinction.

Jamie Man and BL!NDMAN place the fragility of both humans and animals together on stage in the form of a musical meditation, symbolising the delicate connection between ourselves, death, and the natural world around us. The current state of global crisis permeates the performance. When reflecting on the loss of biodiversity, natural disasters, growing gender inequality, war and migration issues, society’s recognition of fragility becomes indispensable.

Building on the biopolitical reflections of thinkers such as Achille Mbembe, VULTURES re-evaluates our perception of decay, death and nature. With a critical eye on practices that seek to politicise life and death, Jamie Man and BL!NDMAN draw inspiration from science philosopher Donna Haraway, who in her Cyborg Manifesto (1985) advocates the radical dismantling of rigid binary boundaries between human/animal, male/female and organism/machine.

The use of a drone in a musical context is especially striking. Drones, which today serve in contexts of war both to destroy and to evacuate, take centre stage in this performance as embodiments of the endangered vultures. Drone technology — entwined with necropolitics yet also utilised in search-and-rescue operations — becomes a symbol of our paradoxical relationship with life and death.

VULTURES is a staging of a musical sky burial, dedicated to bodies in all forms who have lost their lives in current wars, climate disasters and asylum crises. It presents a chilling, polyphonic tableau that reminds us of our own mortality, mirrored by the feathered scavengers of the Old World.