The second installment of our series celebrating Hong Kong artists who pulled off a remarkable feat this year — producing new works that are fresh, clever and compelling — turns the spotlight on dancer-choreographer Terry Tsang and his spectacular re-imagination of the lore that forms the basis of a Cantonese Taoist funeral ritual. Chitralekha Basu writes.

In Travel of Soul Time AFTER Time, dancer-choreographer Terry Tsang King-fai presents the Cantonese Taoist funeral ritual of “breaking hell’s gate” through striking imagery. (CALVIN NG  / CHINA DAILY)

Terry Tsang King-fai’s fascinating, if bizarre, imaginary landscape of hell is brought to life through striking imagery in Travel of Soul Time AFTER Time. Choreographed by Tsang, the piece sees monsters (dancers on stilts) stomp in and out of a surreal terrain through which the souls of the dead must pass. Their bodies grow protuberant digits, like aerial roots on a tree, sprouting at random. One of them carries a jumble of severed human body parts fused together and held aloft like a trophy, while another has a small human figure, perched on the shoulder, like a malignant growth. And then, suddenly, life-sized, featureless puppets are hurled down from above, accumulating in a heap on the stage. These embody the newly deceased souls who need to be escorted out of hell’s gate. The task falls on a bunch of women who wear their long hair like dark curtains, obscuring their faces. It’s difficult to tell if they are saviors or tormentors of the dead; scary, witch-like figures or themselves scared to death. 

While the fantastic beasts and possessed women in Travel of Soul were products of the choreographer’s imagination, the shamans referenced in the City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC) production, which premiered at Kwai Tsing Theatre in May, exist in real life. “Breaking hell’s gate” is an indigenous Cantonese Taoist ritual listed on the First Intangible Cultural Heritage Inventory of Hong Kong and not that uncommon a custom observed across the Pearl River Delta. 

Daniel Yeung, a leading Hong Kong dancer was instrumental in pushing Tsang toward adapting the indigenous variety of dances performed at funeral rituals in Guangdong province into “a contemporary form of dance, rooted in Chinese tradition”. Tsang apprenticed with scriptwriter and actor Wong Wing-sze’s family, who “still performs the ritual in a professional capacity,” Yeung adds. 

Dancers carry puppets, imagined as embodiments of the soul of the dead, to their salvation. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

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.”

The women in the Terry Tsang-choreographed Travel of Soul Time AFTER Time dance with their faces hidden behind long, flailing hair. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Chinese roots

While Tsang’s singular vision informs all his choreographed pieces, Travel of Soul has a special place in his career, and heart, being connected to his roots. It had struck him early on, as he watched his mother sing in Chinese operas, that “a stage performance is also like a ceremony — a kind of ritual that speaks to the presence of an invisible spirit”. Hence adapting a concept based on a shamanistic burial ritual to the language of contemporary dance didn’t feel all that unusual or even particularly challenging.

Yuri Ng, artistic director of CCDC, applauds the fact that Tsang opted for a subject that some others “might think of as a taboo”. He adds that though there are no references to time or location, Travel of Soul, feels “uniquely Hong Kong” and hence “deserved a performing platform”, one that CCDC was happy to offer. 

Yeung feels Travel of Soul has served an important purpose by presenting Chinese heritage in a form that is spectacular, contemporary and fit for the consumption of a global audience. “The world today needs more artists from the East to represent the true nature of contemporary Asian art forms, help open dialogues and foster appreciation of the same,” he adds.

In Vista, dancers in the garb of strange beasts descend on a busy street in Mong Kok for a performance in a public space. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Hair-raising feat

Ng says Tsang is a natural when it comes to composing scenes. Tsang himself believes that the fact that he still does the odd dancing gig makes him a choreographer with a better sense of how to use a dancer. Trying to convince the Travel of Soul dancers that it was possible to perform with one’s sightline obstructed took him some effort, however. From his own point of view, it was a creative choice, made for a reason. “Long and disheveled hair falling across women’s faces suggests both mental instability and a fear of the unknown — as if they covered their eyes from fear of having to face the spirits they will meet on their journey,” Tsang explains. 

Besides, wigs with long, straight hair are a part of his signature aesthetic.  

In April, Tsang wore a similar long-hair wig when he performed in a virgin office space on the 27th floor of Airside, a newly opened mixed-use high-rise in Kai Tak, hiding his face behind its blood-red strands. He stuck two pieces of approximately 1-square-meter paper side by side on the floor — reducing the idea of office cubicles to 2D — and danced next to a male co-performer, each staying within the limits of their demarcated areas. At one point, they looked like two long-haired women dancing with their backs turned to the audience, an effect achieved by wearing the wigs back to front. 

Iven Cheung who co-curated the Meta-Moments exhibition where Tsang performed the piece, points out that the artist’s obsession with hair goes back years. In 2021, Tsang presented a work-in-progress showcase called Terry-fying, at Tai Kwun, trying to exorcize his apparent revulsion toward hair by highlighting its symbolic association with the notions of authority and submission in Chinese culture. The performance piece brought to mind stories of men cutting off their queues in order to defy the authority of Manchu rule, as Sun Yat-sen famously did in 1895.

The Meta-Moments exhibition also featured Tsang’s photos of dancing bodies. His style is to put multiple shots of dancers in action in one frame, which may not sound particularly original. However, the use of unconventional perspectives and the addition of fluorescent highlights turn Tsang’s photos into pieces of abstract art.  

“We find his large-scale photos depicting contoured bodies of dancers and his ability to capture body gestures and human emotions captivating,” remarks Meta-Moments co-curator Hilda Chan. “Seen through Terry’s lens, the bodies have transformed into stunning sculptural objects or imagery with emotions and fluidity.”

Mo Ngaan Tai explores the relationship between desire and the human body, underscoring its imperfections. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

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.”  

Contact the writer at basu@chinadailyhk.com