SAYONARA, performed at Lilian Baylis Sadler’s Wells, is a 10-minute devised dance work created by performers from Chinese, Japanese, and Taiwanese backgrounds. Drawing from shared and divergent funeral traditions, it explores how cultural ritual meets personal experience in the act of farewell.

 

Through dance, physical storytelling, and puppetry, the piece moves between connection and detachment, influenced by Butoh and contemporary contact practices. Gestures such as bows, floral offerings, and the handling of absence evoke impermanence and longing.

 

Rather than enacting ritual, Sayonara is a poetic meditation on death, memory, and letting go — a liminal space where grief is witnessed, silence is meaningful, and goodbye becomes both an ending and a threshold.