Vulture

Vulture draws on an old Tibetan myth about a vulture that, sensing the end of its life, flies high towards the sun and melts away. The image echoes the Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus: both reach towards something beyond human limits, but in different ways. While Icarus loses his life in his pursuit of freedom, the vulture seems to take control of its own ending. Through this parallel, Ching-Ying Chien explores mortality, the unpredictability of life and the limits of the human body.

From beneath a sheet of dark fabric, a body slowly emerges. Chien begins to transform: her shoulder blades flicker like wings, her head turns sharply, and her limbs twist into increasingly unfamiliar shapes. Her body moves between human and animal, stillness and explosive physicality. She falls, contorts, spins and balances in positions that seem to push the body beyond its natural limits, while never losing the sense of effort, vulnerability and danger. The moments in which she comes closest to becoming an animal are also the most unsettling and compelling, turning physical virtuosity into something almost uncanny.

Accompanied by live music, the movement unfolds like a ritual of transformation. Sound, body and space respond to one another as the boundary between dancer and vulture gradually dissolves. Vulture is therefore less a literal retelling of the myth than a physical study of a body testing its own limits: caught between the desire for freedom and the inevitability of death, between control and surrender, between the human and the animal. Its force lies precisely in this physical extremity—the body does not merely represent an idea, but tests it, here and now, in front of us.

Vulture was first developed by Akram Khan Company as part of its Portraits in Otherness initiative and premiered in 2018 at Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells in London. The work was later selected for the Aerowaves Twenty23 programme.

The 2026 edition further strengthens the festival's commitment to regional artistic mobility. In collaboration with Festival Krila (Rijeka), Platformof contemporary dance (Maribor) and Zagreb Dance Festival, selected artists — Rebecca Margolick, Ching-Ying Chien and Charles Brecard — will continue their presentations and workshops beyond Ljubljana through a regional tour.

Ching-Ying Chieng, Rebecca Margolick, Charles Brecard
THREE FACES OF RESTLESTNESS 
@ Rijeka, Ljubljana, Maribor, Zagreb

Three solo performances by three exceptional international dance artists are connected by an exploration of unrest—from stories and experiences passed down through generations, through anger and human fragility, to the desire to take flight and the confrontation with one’s own mortality. Rebecca Margolick (Canada), Charles Brecard (Canada) and Ching-Ying Chieng (Taiwan, United Kingdom) each explore, in their own way, those moments when the body can no longer remain in the same state: when restraint begins to move, when silence turns into anger, or when the desire for freedom collides with the limits of the body itself. Their works meet in different forms of unrest—in what remains trapped, in what erupts, and in what longs to take flight.