BARDO
Premiére 1998 at the House of Dance, Stockholm (Sweden)

CHOREOGRAPHER Virpi Pahkinen
DANCERS Patrick King, Anna Karin Larsson, Mia Lored-Joelsson, Virpi Pahkinen, Shen Wei
MUSIC Akemi Ishijima
SET AND LIGHT DESIGN Jens Sethzman
COSTUME Helene Thorsell
Length approx 60 min with no interval
Bardo has also been made as a tv-version produced by the Swedish Television.

"Bardo – freely making use of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is a poem of movement unfolding its shimmering wings, rising and floating freely. A supreme three-leafed clover discharging the cosmic concept, Pahkinen has at her side Jens Sethzman, whose dizzyingly beautiful staging conveys infinity with an evocative play of light, and the Japanese composer, Akemi Ishijima, with spheric resonances that stir the imagination, envelop the dancers into a floating atmosphere of nebulae and galaxies. ...

Patrick King is a muscular bearer of knowledge, his dark back streaked silvery white. He moves with expressive strength and the reptile-swift reflexes of a cobra. The bloodthirsty god, in Shen Wei’s figure, is a strange field of force in the performance, with explosive dynamics and musical plasticity, from his forhead, down his throat and right down to his navel, divided by a wide red stripe. Around the divine characters of King and Wei lies a dark basic resonance, a dangerous charge, in great contrast to the peaceful image of the bright gods. ...

Bardo is an infinitely beutiful performance the viewer will carry with him or her for a long time."
Gunilla Jensen, Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm 9/11 1998

"Light, music and dance together uphold physical laws such as time and space, and create a state in perception that divides the viewing of it: the beauty places us in a Utopia – but at the same time I have a feeling that behind the disarming calm, a bottomless chasm is lying in wait."
Cecilia Olsson, Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, 9/11 1998