I often think of my dance journey as a spiral. I was born in Chicago, raised in Shanghai, and began dancing through hip hop and other street and social styles. At the time, I didn’t yet see dance as anything more than a surface activity. It wasn’t until years later, looking back, that I began to understand how those early classes were already shaping how I move, how I connect, and how I think about culture. Later, at Columbia College Chicago, I trained in ballet, modern, and jazz, and it was there that I first encountered the question: what is contemporary dance? At the time, I understood it mostly as a category—a way to describe performances that didn’t fit neatly into one box.
Now, years later, I return to Columbia this fall for their “What Is Contemporary?”symposium, carrying with me a different perspective. To me, contemporary dance is not a style but a framework. It is a way to hold multiplicity, to spiral between past, present, and future. My practice draws from many lineages—not to collapse them into sameness, but to honor their origins while creating space for dialogue, transformation, and meaning-making.
“A gesture might begin as technical or virtuosic, but once grief enters, it folds inward. Once spectacle enters, it reaches outward, glitters, demands attention. Once failure enters, the movement breaks, collapses, or redirects. Contemporary dance, for me, is the framework that allows these transformations to coexist.”
I often describe contemporary dance as a form of transcultural flow. Hip hop, jazz, ballet, social dances, modern—all of these vocabularies are part of my background, but I am less interested in naming a specific style than in using contemporary dance as a structure for multiplicity: a way of moving that can engage histories, invite presence, and imagine futures. For me, the stage is not just a platform for display—it is a space of communication. Performance becomes a way to make meaning, to express contradictions, and to engage culture through movement.
My current research brings these ideas into dialogue with the legacy of Leslie Cheung, the Hong Kong pop icon whose concerts and films have become central to queer cultural memory. His 1997 performance of “Red,” in a rhinestone suit and bedazzled red heels, embodies what I mean by spectacle—an aesthetic armor that dazzles, seduces, and protects. But behind the shimmer was also fragility, grief, and contradiction. In my work, I take those themes—spectacle, grief, failure—and ask: what are their motions, their gestures? What physicality emerges from grief? How can spectacle be both powerful and vulnerable? How might failure itself become a method, not as an end point, but as a way of reimagining movement?
These questions don’t stay theoretical. They show up in rehearsal, where I explore how emotion can shift, queer, or embellish phrases that already exist. A gesture might begin as technical or virtuosic, but once grief enters, it folds inward. Once spectacle enters, it reaches outward, glitters, demands attention. Once failure enters, the movement breaks, collapses, or redirects. Contemporary dance, for me, is the framework that allows these transformations to coexist.
Contemporary dance is always shifting, always unstable. And that is what makes it so alive. It is a framework that can hold contradiction, a practice that spirals across time, and an invitation to think deeper about how movement carries culture, memory, and imagination.
What might it mean, then, to see dance not only as performance, but as a way of spiraling through who we were, who we are, and who we might become?
photo credits: Photo montage by Timothy Tsang, images of Timothy in gallery and banner: William Frederking.
Timothy Tsang (BA, 2017) received his BA in Dance with a minor in Arts Administration from Columbia College Chicago. He returns to the Dance Center October 16, 2025 to present a workshop on his current research as part of our What is Contemporary? Fall 2025 Symposium. Tsang is a queer Chinese American dance artist whose work bridges movement, cultural memory, and embodied research. Currently pursuing his MFA in Dance at the University of Michigan, he is a recipient of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies Fellowship and Rackham International Research Award. His current research investigates the legacy of Leslie Cheung and the aesthetics of queer Chinese cinema. Through choreography, research, and pedagogy, Tsang investigates how contemporary dance can serve as a site of cultural consciousness and embodied simultaneity.
