Ching Ying Chien

In this partial adaptation of poet Karthika Naïr’s award-winning book Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, an original reworking of the epic Mahabharata, Akram Khan uses kathak and contemporary dance to tell the tale of Amba, a princess abducted on her wedding day and stripped of her honour, who invokes the gods to seek revenge.

As robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) become increasingly prevalent, questions arise around their impact on human relationships. Travelling the world from the UK to Japan and the USA, Akram Khan meets with scientists and their creations of AI that already coexist with humans. In doing so, he confronts his own scepticism of how we can form emotional connections with machines. This film gives rise to an exhilarating duet performed by Khan and Ching-Ying Chien.