Before We Say Goodbye｜70Min

Artistic Director Tsai, Po-Cheng of B.DANCE presents his fourth full-length work — a piece that gathers the life stories of ten dancers and multiple elders, distilled into written form. Mining the deepest recesses of memory, the work excavates the dark chambers and warm rooms within, releasing emotion through the body to etch out life's rainy days and moments of clarity. In the impermanence of arising and ceasing, the mind continues — and the work becomes a tender ceremony of remembrance, drifting and swaying through the lingering threads of thought that gather before life's final chapter.
"To be human is to need practice in saying goodbye — yet this is the hardest lesson of all." — 百日告別 (One Hundred Days of Farewell)
This work peers into the impermanence of life. Every farewell feels like a reminder of how fragile and transient existence truly is. Life is held within the embrace of grief, loss, tenderness, and hope. In the name of love, the body becomes a series of warm candleflames, gathered together into a memoir written for the future.
One lifetime of meeting and parting is enough — as long as it is etched into the heart, nothing truly disappears. Each day, countless people come and go from this world. When we face the separations of the living and the departures of the dying, we become extraordinarily fragile. Yet time slowly dims even the memories most deeply carved into us. When we no longer recall, we no longer grieve — and so we practice: practice being brave, practice losing, practice sorrow. In time, we come to understand that to grieve with full sincerity is to move beyond grief. What we must hold onto is not the wound itself, but the shared experience that carried both your name and mine.
World Premiere: October 30, 2021 | Taipei City Theater, Taiwan