VULTURES

We are all confronted with the same fear, the wound of mortality, the worm at the core of our 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 composed by British-Chinese composer Jamie Man 文珮玲, commissioned by BL!NDMAN.

The awareness of death is what connects us as human beings, yet at the same time it is something we dare not face. We prefer to avoid it, to tuck it away in a shroud of taboo. In doing so, we increasingly deny what we essentially are: mortal, vulnerable beings.

In VULTURES, Jamie Man places life and death side by side on stage in the form of an auditory ritual, delivered through drone speakers, vocal mantras, field recordings, animal sounds, saxophones, and electronics.

Inspired by ancient Tibetan customs, she stages a musical sky burial — a type of funerary practice in which the dead are given to vultures. The deceased become nourishment for the living, and their souls continue to exist in the vultures that ascend to the heavens. Yet the vultures needed for these sky burials are now critically endangered. These Dakinis — Tibetan angels who carry the soul to the heavens to await reincarnation — are themselves on the threshold of death due to mass extinction. Jamie Man brings the vulnerability of both humans and animals together on stage in the form of a musical meditation, symbolic of the fragile bond between ourselves, death, and the natural world around us. The result is a hauntingly polyphonic tableau that reminds us of our own mortality, reflected through feathered scavengers of the Old World.