You can’t review a 21-day theatre experience the day after it ends. What I felt at the beginning changed so dramatically over the course of the experience that it has taken me five days to figure out how I feel about it now that it’s over. Which is to say: mainly sad. I miss it.
Radix Theatre’s TBD: Liberation Through Hearing had become a part of my life, despite my life’s complete and utter resistance to it. Based on text and ritual from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, TBD was presented as a 21-day guided journey through the afterlife, running Oct. 25-Nov. 14 at locations around Vancouver.
“Imagine you are travelling between death and rebirth, across a realm known in Tibetan Buddhism as the Bardo,” went the pitch. Only, instead of a Lama guiding us newly deceased, we would have our smartphones and a veritable army of solemn Radix Theatre actors.
Participants were warned that they had to be “mentally and emotionally stable enough to consider notions of dying.”
Check.
In the meantime, we had to sign our life away, giving our cell phone numbers, home addresses, car makes and licence plates, work info and more in the waiver-signing process at the opening reception at Mountain View Cemetery. We also had to download an app to our phones that tracked where we were in the city at any given moment. This was so the Radix actors could find us in our daily lives and make contact, reminding each of us (and there were allegedly 100 people participating) in some small way every day that we were dead.
I felt it was going to require a lot of busy, skeptical, unspiritual me to be successful. That might be why I didn’t tell my husband at first that I was participating. And so it began.
The first contact was a text message with a link to a podcast that explained the state of affairs.
“You will now listen to a story. The story of a death. Your death. Don’t freak out – it’s just a story,” a woman intoned over ethereal background music.
I enjoyed listening to the seven-minute piece, but felt guilty that I'd experienced it standing up in my kitchen, instead of lying down with headphones as advised. Day one and I didn’t particularly feel dead, but the guilt and religion side of things seemed about right.
The next day, though, the experience started feeling surreal.
My husband came home from work to find a suspicious paper bag with my name written on it just sitting on our front steps. Needless to say he was alarmed, and he raced upstairs to show me and ask what it was.
At first, I had no idea. It being close to Halloween, I thought it might be a prank – perhaps even a bag full of dog poo – and was a bit distraught and afraid to open it. But then I saw the tiny TBD logo and realization dawned on me. Upon opening, though, the contents of the package (which I won't reveal) did little to allay my husband’s concern. He looked at me incredulously and I bashfully explained that I had signed up for a three-week theatre experience about death and strangers might be coming by the house from time to time with things for me.
It went as well as could be expected.
For the first few days, trying to transition from daily work mode to peaceful introspection proved impossible for me. But while I wasn’t buying into the spiritual nature of the texts I was being sent, I began to look forward to the notes. I would save them for a time, usually late at night, when I felt I could actually dedicate myself to the experience, and then give them a chance.
A glitch in the tracking app meant that support people from the show also started texting me from time to time to confirm my whereabouts. While I have no way of quantifying how much that impacted my immersion in the show, it was nice to have actual conversations with my spirit guides. They were friendly, and I looked forward to those, too.
Things really started to change when, during a Friday night dinner party at my house, I was visited. A loud knock brought me to the front door, where a small bag tied with black ribbon sat on the mat.
By the time I got there, the two men dressed in mottled grey suits had moved down the steps and into the darkness.
“That is a cup of salt,” they explained of the delivery. “It is roughly the amount of salt that was in your body when you died.”
They told me to carry it with me everywhere, and then disappeared. I hefted the small reminder of my life in my hand and felt very pensive for the rest of the night. That weekend, every time I looked in my purse and saw it, I felt a thrill. It became a totem from this second world I was living in and helped me move back and forth more easily.
Every time I had an opportunity to talk about my TBD experience with my friends, they seemed fascinated by the idea, and it became a fun topic to discuss with outsiders.
Next up was a field trip to Stanley Park. That weekend, Oct. 31 and Nov. 1, there was a terrible storm though. Participants were asked to make their way with their bag of salt to Third Beach during one of two windows of time, but I hibernated until the very last minute, hoping the weather would let up.
It possibly only got worse.
Wandering along the seawall on a miserably wet day was not something I would have elected to ever do, but the beauty of the moment quickly struck me. The sun was performing alchemy on the horizon, turning a boring grey clouds into gold. The water was gently dancing against the rocks, and there were no crowds to interrupt my thoughts. It had a very heavenly vibe. I was feeling it.
It became a game of guessing which of the people was "the one I needed." There was the woman walking backwards. There was the man speaking with no sound coming out. There were the watchers, dressed all in black. Soaked by the rain with my bag of salt in hand, I eventually found my guide standing quietly near Siwash Rock.
I won’t spoil what follows, but I will say trying to juggle my purse, umbrella, and obligations in the rain was devastatingly difficult. At one point, halfway through the ritual, my umbrella actually blew off my shoulder, down the seawall and into the ocean. As I squealed in horror, my Radix companion didn’t break character for a second. She didn’t move to help, or laugh, or acknowledge that this was not part of the plan. I actually gave her the “one second, please” finger, lay down in a puddle on the seawall, and stretched down to the water to grab it before it drifted away. So much for leaving earthly pleasures behind...
She was a consummate professional, but, admittedly, the spell was kind of broken. Take away of the day? Even in death I’m a klutz.
I embraced the thought of coming back in a new body as I walked back to my car. I also felt way more connected to the show now that I had seen the scope of what they were attempting to do. The sheer number of people putting in their weekend in the rain to help us contemplate our lives was humbling and I left that experience with a Bardo glow.
Which was why I felt a genuine sense of apprehension when, a few days later, the TBD text message said today was the “final day with the peaceful deities”.
I liked the peaceful deities. I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet the NON-peaceful deities.
The next contact was a postcard in the mail with my picture on it in front of a burning house. "If your house was burning down, what's the one material object you would save?" it asked. My husband was, once again, not stoked. He put it up on the fridge, mostly likely as a reminder of how weird I am.
Next, my trackers texted to arrange another home visit. Promptly at 7pm, there was a knock and I opened my door to see my seawall guide, of the umbrella incident, standing there in street clothes. She smiled. I smiled. We both remembered.
She told me she was there to help me. In the same vein as the postcard, she asked me to look around my house and identify something that would be difficult to part with. Something I’m tied to emotionally. Giving it away should hurt, she said.
My husband watched on in amusement (he’s always hassling me to get rid of stuff). Finally, a TBD experience he could get behind! As I darted around the house looking for something appropriate, they struck up a friendly conversation in the living room. By the time I found my item, he was giving her a tour of the house (which is old and somewhat interesting).
But the visit was all about me, and as we sat back down and I placed the item in the purple velvet bag she produced, I was completely caught off guard by what happened next: I burst into tears.
We talked a little bit about why the item was so important to me, but that wasn’t really the point. It was simply the experience of letting go. She really was there to help me, in whatever form that came in, and I felt palpable relief as she took my item away into the night.
TBD only got more powerful from there. There were four more significant moments of contact and each one offered a new frame of reference for my living life and my afterlife. The show traversed three distinct acts. It built momentum, like traditional theatre, and created emotion, surprise and anticipation.
By the time I was finding my "next body" in the Re-birth Mobile, having sadly NOT achieved enlightenment (I wanted to see what would happen if I stayed in the experience until the very end), I knew that my decisions within the show, the sentences they asked me to scribble down and the things they asked me to contemplate, and let go of, had actually resonated in real life.
Five days later I’m still talking about it. Last night, after describing TBD to a girlfriend, she asked excitedly, “Can anybody do it?”
Living and dying, I wondered? I should think so. But it sure helps to have guides along the way.
