Waiting for Bardo(t)

In Waiting for Bardo(t), two young women, Jaja and LiLi, find themselves entangled in Godot, Bardot, the bardo and butoh, as they search for the ineffable.

Waiting is a kind of limbo, a space-time of in-between-ness. In Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s characters live in a state of not knowing, where famously, ‘nothing happens, twice’. Brigitte Bardot found the life of a celebrity, in-between multiple husbands and lovers, pleasure and excess to be profoundly dissatisfying. In Japanese aesthetic terms, the in-between known as ma, is embodied in the dance theatre form of Butoh as strangely elastic space-time. Bardo is the Tibetan Buddhist term for the state between death and re-birth as well as any experience of in-between-ness, all of which hold possibilities for freedom.