Ritual feast

Heart beats for Hong Kong

In April, Tsang picked up two awards at the Hong Kong Dance Awards 2022. These include the Tom Brown Emerging Choreographer Award as well as the Award for Outstanding Online Production for the Labora-Terry Landscape series. He is particularly pleased about the latter "because online streaming of dance shows is a new form of art, and also because the project involved collaborations with a film director and creative people from other fields in order to do justice to a new form".

Next up is a new production that explores the relationship between dance and sign language and will involve users of the latter. Perennially on the lookout for new tools to use toward building new dance vocabularies, Tsang is all too aware of hitting a dead end, but that has never stopped him from trying.

His dream is to see a new dance style that is uniquely Hong Kong evolve. "I would like to work toward developing a dance language with strong Hong Kong features, one that throws light on Hong Kong culture, helps people understand what it is about," he says. "I've already started my research," he adds, excited by the thought of yet more discoveries.

The process entails minutely observing how Hong Kong people move around in their everyday lives and the sociocultural reasons behind such movements.

"I am drawing on Hong Kong culture, such as music, literature and social behavior, to create a language of dance that is intrinsically Hong Kong," Tsang says. "I believe this project will be informed by all the things I have experienced and absorbed in my life so far."