陳 靄 媛 MEL CHAN
Last Cup of Tea: A Rehearsal
Medium: Participatory Performance with Bubble Milk Tea, Cup, Straws, Table, Chairs
Duration: Around 10 minutes Per Session
Proposed Location: A quiet Place
Variations: One-to-one Sessions repeated over Several Hours, or Group Workshops with maximum 6 people
In this performance, participants are invited to rehearse drinking what might be their “last cup of tea.” Not as a gesture of despair, but as an act of heightened attention: a rehearsal for endings, which are always already present in our beginnings.
What appears at first to be a mindfulness exercise slowly reveals itself as something larger—an invitation to notice how even the smallest gesture is saturated with histories, systems, and ecologies. A plastic straw, designed for a single use, will persist longer than our bodies. Tea leaves trace centuries of trade, empire, and migration. Milk carries with it not only cultural habit, but climate, geography, and survival. Sugar recalls a global story of desire, violence, and comfort.
Each sip becomes a rehearsal in interconnectedness—where the self is never separate, but always co-constituted with others, with plants, with animals, with objects, with time. Drinking tea becomes an act of acknowledging that our existence is not accidental, but woven into a dense fabric of pasts and futures, intimate and planetary.
The performance asks: how does history pass through our bodies in the most ordinary acts? And what might it mean to rehearse presence not only as “living in the now,” but as recognizing how every now is already a condensation of countless lives, choices, and materials?
