In Taiwanese folklore, the dead cross the Naihe Bridge and drink a bowl of Meng Po’s soup to forget their past lives before rebirth. It is a story heard since childhood—some say the soup allows us to let go, granting a clean start.
The N-th Bowl of Meng Po’s Soup departs from this familiar yet rarely examined folk imagination. Using the soup as a point of inquiry, it asks: when stepping onto the path of death, can the draught of "letting go" truly erase the past? If memory is lost, how can repentance exist? If everything returns to zero, how do we remain accountable for past mistakes and truly change?
Formally, the work employs a non-narrative collage structure, unfolding coexisting temporalities and spatialities. Three dancers meet and intersect; sometimes like strangers, sometimes as if long-acquainted. Their pull and dislocation suggest past and present overlapping—an entanglement beyond text, happening vividly through the body.
A recurring "long-short-short" step rhythm subtly echoes a funeral procession or the hesitant steps across the Naihe Bridge—a transitional state neither fully ended nor begun, lingering at the boundary. Within this cycle, the soup is no longer just a myth, but a state repeatedly experienced. Perhaps memory never vanishes; it simply returns through the body and unavoidable reunions.
The question remains: If we are destined to meet and repeat, is this bowl an end, or another beginning?