Po-Cheng Tsai is a contemporary choreographer and director from Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Trained in the gifted dance track at Zuoying Senior High School and later at the Taipei National University of the Arts, he also studied on scholarship at Purchase College, State University of New York. These early cross-cultural experiences shaped his sensitivity to the “multi-lingual” nature of the body. His works grow from lived experience, balancing lyric feeling with measured wit. He links theatrical structure with extreme physicality to create taut, mysterious rhythms onstage, where light, space, and movement press precisely against one another. Beyond dance training, Tsai has long followed fashion—the logic of cut, fabric, and silhouette translates into choreographic line and costume dynamics. His wide listening across classical, electronic, and ambient music informs rhythmic frameworks, while his body-centered responses to world events transform contemporary conditions into kinetic questions for the stage.

 

Tsai’s rise was rapid. In 2014 his debut Floating Flowers premiered in Europe, winning both the Audience Award and the Gauthier Dance // Theaterhaus Stuttgart Production Award at the International Choreographic Competition Hannover. That momentum quickly spread. He founded B.DANCE in 2014 to advance a mission: let Taiwanese original work speak globally. Within a few years he earned the First Prize and Production Award at the Copenhagen International Choreography Competition for Hugin/Munin (2015), followed by the Berner Tanzpreis at Tanzplattform Bern for Innermost (2017) and Orthrus (2019). In 2020 he received the Special Jury Prize at Milan’s International Award “Il Teatro Nudo” of Teresa Pomodoro. He was named one of tanz magazine’s “Most Promising Choreographers” (2017/2018), won France’s critics’ prize Révélation chorégraphique in 2020, was honored as one of Taiwan’s Ten Outstanding Young Persons in 2021, and in 2024 received the 28th Taiwan–France Cultural Award for advancing Taiwan–Europe cultural exchange. Together these honors chart his path from emerging voice to mature artist, consolidating B.DANCE’s profile worldwide.

 

Alongside his company work, Tsai has choreographed for Luzerner Theater and Theater Bern in Switzerland, Gauthier Dance in Stuttgart, Introdans in the Netherlands, and Cloud Gate 2 in Taiwan. These collaborations expanded vocabularies while refining his craft: the restraint of European theater, the cool order of Nordic aesthetics, and the agile strength of Taiwanese training fuse into an energy that shifts fluidly between modes. Tsai values dialogue with theaters and technical teams, adapting each piece for proscenium stages, black boxes, or semi-outdoor settings without losing its identity.

 

Since 2016 he has also led B.OOM by B.DANCE, an international initiative and boutique festival combining performances, workshops, and public talks into a clear three-part framework. The project emphasizes small-to-mid-scale works with tourable technical packages and invites award-winning independent artists—including Marcos Morau, Andrea Costanzo Martini, Jill Crovisier, Tu Hoang, and Liliana Barros—to Taiwan for creation and exchange. Partnerships with Malaysia’s DPAC Arts Centre, Kuandu Arts Festival, and the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying) have extended its reach. Beyond programming, B.OOM experiments with fashion-driven visuals, brand collaborations, and culinary culture, linking dance with urban life. Its philosophy privileges recognition over spectacle: stripped-back black-box settings focus viewers on the body—breath, weight, micro-shifts of force—while workshops embed knowledge in the community, seeding future co-productions and touring.

 

To date, Tsai has created eight full-length works, ten mid-length pieces, and nine short works, plus more than twenty commissions. B.DANCE tours on a modular repertory with tourable technical packages: programs can be scaled by length and cast to suit diverse venues. Education and outreach travel as standard, inviting audiences not only to watch but to enter the company’s practices. This system has generated hundreds of performances worldwide, building a touring model that is both stable and flexible.

 

Aesthetically, Tsai’s stage language often juxtaposes ceremonial tableaux with sudden eruptions. His phrasing—drawing, sweeping, gathering, bracing—lets force pivot across subdivided beats, so sound, sight, and sensation converge. Costumes are treated as integral to movement, their cut and weight shaping rhythm and momentum. Musically he builds on pulse and breath, bridging classical repertoire and electronics, melody and soundscape, so that dancers and score pull through and against each other. Contemporary issues appear not as declarations but as atmospheres: solitude and cohesion, order and entropy, desire and restraint emerge in gestures, counterpoints, or silence.

 

Looking ahead, Po-Cheng Tsai continues to see his work as a dialogue between Taiwan and the world. He aims to expand collaborations with theaters and companies across Europe and beyond, presenting works that merge dance, fashion, and music into a living language. His vision is to keep refining choreography as a medium that does not merely comment on contemporary life but embodies it—asking sharper questions through the body, and allowing audiences in different cities to find themselves mirrored in motion.

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