Eric Leong (they/he) is a queer artist of Chinese-Bruneian descent who performs as Komodo. Their artistic journey began with over a decade of classical piano training through the Royal Conservatory of Music, later evolving into an autodidact dance practice spanning salsa, voguing, whacking, and burlesque. As the founder of Paifang, a queer cultural event series in Montreal’s Chinatown, their artistic practice is deeply rooted in community, exploring themes of intergenerational connection, queerness, and diasporic identity.
Queer Diasporic Movement: Blending Whacking & Chinese Folk Dance to Taiwanese Campus Folk Songs is a dance project that reimagines Taiwanese Campus Folk Songs (校園民歌) through the lenses of memory, queerness, and intergenerational connection. Bringing together Chinese-speaking seniors and queer diasporic youth, the work fuses Chinese Folk Dance with Whacking—a queer dance style born in 1970s Los Angeles—to create a vibrant dialogue between tradition and self-expression.
Originally written by Taiwanese university students during the martial law era, Campus Folk Songs blended poetic lyricism and folk-inspired melodies. They became deeply rooted in the Mandarin-speaking diaspora, carrying stories of love, longing, and migration across generations. For many Chinese Canadians, these songs embody a bridge to homeland and family memory.
This project aims to explore these nostalgic melodies via embodied storytelling through the intersection of the elegance and symbolism of Chinese Folk Dance and the expressive flair of Whacking. The envisioned result is a choreographic exploration of belonging, identity, and the possibility of new cultural futures—honouring ancestral aesthetics while amplifying queer diasporic voices that resonate across generations.