The Department of Dance presents a performance created by Tim Tsang, candidate for the Master of Fine Arts in Dance.

Blending contemporary dance, live performance, and concert spectacle, this event will unfold as a concert-meets-dance experience, featuring ensemble choreography, live vocals, spoken reflection, and cinematic lighting by collaborator David Goodman-Edberg.

The performance invites audiences into a shared emotional landscape – one shaped by ambition, grief, resilience, and connection. Drawing on Hong Kong cultural icon Leslie Cheung’s concerts, films, and public persona, the performance traces a journey from glamour to intimacy through Cheung’s legacy. It examines pressure, visibility, and the search for care. At its core, This Dance Is About Leslie Cheung is not only about legacy, but about how legacy, identity, and inspiration is carried forward.

Rather than offering a biography of Leslie Cheung, the concert stages an encounter with his legacy. Cheung appears as an influence, a fantasy, and a point of departure – someone whose artistry opened doors while also revealing the emotional cost of visibility. The performance traces how admiration can slip into imitation, how confidence can fracture under pressure, and how failure might become a pathway toward care.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Created by choreographer and Dance MFA candidate Timothy Tsang, This Dance Is About Leslie Cheung reflects Tsang’s ongoing inquiry into how performance carries memory, pressure, and care. Tsang is a queer Chinese American dance artist whose work bridges movement, cultural memory, and embodied research. Shaped by a transnational upbringing between Shanghai and Chicago, his choreography often moves between different cultural contexts – asking how bodies navigate identity, visibility, and belonging.