Ritual feast

Brooding intensity

Not that Tsang needed much convincing in order to sign up for the project. By his own admission, the dancer-choreographer tends to gravitate toward themes that are somber and melancholic. "I'm attracted to those elements of traditional Chinese culture that speak of serious and mournful things," Tsang says. The music he had heard being played at his grandfather's funeral as a child continues to haunt him. Tsang used some of those same tunes to guide him through choreographing Travel of Soul.

The dark and disquieting lens through which Tsang chooses to view the world may not have universal appeal, but the grotesque, bestial creatures inhabiting the fictional realms he creates might be closer to home than we care to recognize at the outset. Take Vista, an episode of Tsang's four-chapter dance video series, Labora-Terry Landscape, which follows three dancers on a journey. Enveloped in bulky black costumes, with enormous, puffed sleeves and animal-skull-shaped masks, the trio is shown hurtling on their way out of the green idyll of a Hong Kong country park to descend on a busy traffic intersection in Mong Kok. Tsang says that he imagined the beastly figures in the piece as a metaphor for the spread of germs. "The three performers were like aliens infiltrating a space that was not theirs." Though released on the Leisure and Cultural Services Department's website only in 2022, the video was shot in 2019, almost as if it were anticipating the pandemic.

Tsang agrees that his preferred aesthetic is not meant for the fainthearted. Works like Mo Ngaan Tai - Mo4 Ngaan5 Tai2 - Juk6 in an earlier version and now all set to return in a new, enhanced iteration at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre on July 14 - seem designed to shake the audience members out of their comfort zones, not just because the dancers appear wearing nothing much besides body paint but rather more so because the piece takes an unabashed look at desire manifest in bodies that do not necessarily conform to the standards of a model figure.

"I think it might be a reflection of my attitude to life," says the choreographer, responding to a question about his tendency to observe the world from an angle that makes everything look a bit skewed. "I'm not satisfied with conforming to a pattern," he continues. "I always have this overwhelming urge to do more than a realistic and conventional depiction of ideas. I want to stir the audience's imagination, and show them that there are many alternative ways of viewing the world."