Poetry of Angel Island Detainees Inspires Oakland Ballet Performance

When Oakland Ballet Artistic Director Graham Lustig began planning the fourth annual Dancing Moons Festival about two years ago, he had little idea that it would arrive amid heated headlines about the United States government summarily detaining and deporting immigrants.

With its focus on Asian American and Pacific Islander choreographers, the festival had already provided an unprecedented spotlight in a creative realm with a slim track record of showcasing AAPI dance makers. The May 4 Paramount Theatre premiere of a major new work, Angel Island Project, catapults the respected but low-key Oakland Ballet into the midst of a roiling debate centering on fundamental questions about who belongs here and who decides.

Inspired by the experiences of detainees at Angel Island, the United States’ primary immigration facility on the West Coast from 1910 to 1940, the ballet features the work of seven choreographers: Natasha Adorlee, Lawrence Chen, Feng Ye, Elaine Kudo, Ashley Thopiah, Wei Wang, and Phil Chan (who was appointed Oakland Ballet’s first artist-in-residence last spring).

Lustig acknowledges the hot-button nature of the project while pushing back against the work’s topical implications.

“We’re not a political organization and we’re not trying to make a political point,” said the British-born choreographer. “Immigration has always been a hot topic. The Dancing Moons Festival is an opportunity to lift up Asian American creative voices: composers, designers, and choreographers. This just seemed a good fit.”

It’s a fit that’s inextricably entwined with the Bay Area, and not merely because Angel Island is a 15-minute ferry ride from Tiburon. An intricate collaboration with the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation and Angel Island Parks and Recreation, the ballet is set to Huang Ruo’s “Angel Island,” an epic oratorio commissioned by Del Sol Quartet in 2020 with support from a Hewlett Foundation 50 Arts Commission.

While the quartet has performed “Angel Island” with vocal ensembles around the world since its 2021 premiere at the Presidio Theatre, the Dancing Moons Festival marks the first Bay Area performance of an eighth movement that Huang Ruo added for a 2023 production in Singapore. At the Paramount, the vocal ensemble Volti, conducted by Wei Cheng, joins Del Sol along with Oakland Ballet’s 12 dancers, with lighting design by Courtney Carson and costumes by Alysia Chang and Kaori Higashiyama.

Despite so many collaborators, and contributions by seven choreographers, “it’s a seamless production,” Lustig says. “We have 12 dancers in the company and it became a jigsaw puzzle. Someone works with seven, there are five others who are available for the following piece. In some cases, one movement flows into the next, but there are a few dramatic endings where the stage goes dark.”

The libretto is based on San Francisco Poet Laureate Genny Lim’s English translations of poems carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station barracks — text that Del Sol violist Charlton Lee encountered in her 1991 volume Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940.

Lee’s parents immigrated from China in the 1960s, “and I didn’t learn that history until I was in college,” he said. “It opened my eyes to the historical discrimination against Chinese in America. There’s such a wealth of stories and history, and people are unaware of it, including a lot of newer immigrants. They don’t realize how long this type of stuff has been going on.”

Born and raised in China and now based in New York City, Huang Ruo drew on a kaleidoscopic array of styles and idioms while composing “Angel Island,” including Chinese folk music, natural and processed sounds, Western avant-garde, noise, rock and jazz. (His collaboration with playwright David Henry Hwang, The Monkey King, premieres at San Francisco Opera in November).

For Feng Ye, who moved from Beijing to San Jose in 2016, the dislocation, homesickness and loneliness expressed in the Angel Island poems is viscerally familiar. Her training in Chinese classical and contemporary dance made leaping into ballet a steep challenge.

In an excerpt that Oakland Ballet presented at Angel Island Immigration Station on a sunny afternoon in late March, Feng’s piece made canny use of a 40-foot-long plait, deploying the two-sided symbolism of hair in Chinese culture while also using the braid as a device to reorganize the stage.

“There’s so much about the hair,” she said. “If the girl falls in love, and they want to live together their whole life, they cut small piece as gift. But if they separate, she cuts a small piece and gives that, and they separate, forever. I wanted to use the braid, the long line, to change the space on stage. The braid connects the dancers, and we make a small space like family to support each other. But sometimes it separates people, and we extend the space.”

Expanding the closed circle has long been a motivation for Lustig. In his first U.S. job as artistic director of the American Repertory Ballet Theater in Princeton, New Jersey from 1999-2010, he created Dancing Through the Ceiling, a commissioning project for emerging and established women choreographers.

On that front, tremendous progress has been made since 2001, when he began his efforts to obliterate ballet’s glass ceiling. Lustig’s hope is that before too long, an event like the Dancing Moons Festival won’t seem necessary, but current events suggest that it will have reason to continue for many a season.

“The ballet hasn’t had a reputation for being very inclusive,” Lustig said. “There are opportunities for change. I feel as a company, we dance our social justice. We have an opportunity to elevate voices and stories not seen.”

The Angel Island Project will be performed at Oakland Ballet’s Dancing Moons Festival on Sunday, May 4, at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland. Details here.