I created the dance film BARDO in collaboration with choreographer-performer Lyra Butler-Denman, as an adaptation of her live evening-length performance of the work. Rooted in the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the bardo—the transitional state between death and rebirth—the film meditates on grief, dying, and transformation, inviting viewers into the liminal space between presence and absence.

Filmed in intimate and elemental settings, the work follows Butler-Denman through moments of stillness, lyricism, chaos, grief, and reckoning. Threaded throughout is a recurring bird’s-eye view of a ritual movement sequence, repeated again and again as she recedes into darkness. The film also incorporates audio recordings of Butler-Denman’s late father, deepening its exploration of memory, loss, and continuity across generations.

As Butler-Denman describes:


“To grieve is to feel love that has nowhere to go. A conversation and a conjuring, BARDO embodies the transition states of dying, of grieving, and of a relationship moving from the physical plane to existing, maybe (we hope), somewhere else. It reckons with the lack of guideposts, the emptiness and loneliness after a death, and with the active process of filling that space, of making a map where there is none.”

BARDO was intended for audiences beyond the theater and has been screened in contexts ranging from festivals to hospices. It was selected as an Official Selection of Breaking Walls Dance Films.