bardo

Bardo, in Tibetan Buddhism, is the name for the intermediate state of existence — a term also applied to the transitional states within a living being's existence more broadly. According to Buddhist thought, these transitional periods are best suited to recognizing the underlying, pure consciousness. Several such bardos are named even within a single lifetime: the bardo of human existence, of dreaming, and of meditation. In his piece Tiszavirág (MayFly), Gyula Cserepes focused on impermanence.

Continuing that same line of thought — zooming in, in a sense, on the concept of ephemerality itself — he became occupied with the moment of birth and the moment of death. With the help of János Vas, his former ethnography teacher, he examined traditions, customs, and beliefs from across the Hungarian-speaking world tied to these two pillars marking the beginning and end of human life, and arrived at a focus on the state of the in-between as the basis for a new piece. The performance is, on one hand, a flow of stage images and scenes built from those ethnographic sources. On the other, it is a stage ritual inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thödol), attempting to capture the fleeting, to show the invisible, to hold passing — for one moment — still.