As part of its fourth annual Dancing Moons Festival, the Oakland Ballet is set to perform an especially relevant work, the world premiere of “The Angel Island Project,” on May 4 at the Paramount Theatre.
Related Articles
Get lost in a world of floating art at San Francisco’s Balloon Museum
Bartender who created tequila sunrise at Bay Area restaurant dies at 77
Beyoncé debuts her Cowboy Carter Tour with a moving and masterful show at SoFi Stadium
Meghan Markle to lose royal title after William becomes king: report
It’s going to be a festive Cinco de Mayo weekend in San Jose
The dancers will have the musical support of the Del Sol String Quartet and Volti, a vocal ensemble, performing Huang Ruo’s oratorio “Angel Island.”
Many people know Angel Island as a lovely spot to hike or picnic, unaware that it was the Ellis Island of the West Coast from 1910 to 1940, processing immigrants, particularly Chinese and other Asians, entering the country, and even detaining them under horrific conditions. How quickly dreams of a new life and freedom could shift to despair.
The Del Sol Quartet’s violist, Charlton Lee, a second-generation Chinese American, met and worked with Huang at the Santa Fe Opera.
“Huang’s opera ‘Dr. Sun Yat-sen’ was probably the first Western-style opera that was sung in Chinese,” Lee said. “It was quite unusual at the time but I was just completely taken by the way that he was able to set the Chinese language to music. Every language has a style and it’s actually not that easy to capture the nuance of that language well. The example I like to use is, rock ‘n’ roll works really well in English because it sounds like the way we speak. I was trying to find a project to do with him that involved Chinese words, and the poems that are carved into the walls of the detention center on Angel Island seemed like the perfect vehicle.”
In 2017, with a grant from the Hewlett Foundation, the Del Sol String Quartet commissioned Huang to write an oratorio about Angel Island’s history based on the poems. The quartet and composer visited the island in 2018 to begin delving into material to use in the project. One example portrays the end of a journey:
When we bade farewell to our village home,
We were in tears because of survival’s desperation.
When we arrived in the American territory,
We stared in vain at the vast ocean.
Our ship docked
And we were transferred to a solitary island.
Ten li from the city,
My feet stand on this lonely hill.
The muk uk is three stories high,
Built as firmly as the Great Wall.
Room after room are but jails,
And the North Gate firmly locked.
The pandemic interrupted the development of the oratorio, but its first iteration was performed in San Francisco and on Angel Island in 2021. Later the work was expanded and performed in the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in Berkeley, and in Singapore. While some of these versions have used two dancers, or choreography for the singers, Oakland Ballet’s version is the first to employ an entire company of 12 dancers in eight sections from seven choreographers.
In 2023, Phil Chan, Oakland Ballet’s artist-in-residence, brought the work to company artistic director Graham Lustig’s attention. Lustig jumped in to start working on developing a whole new production of the work. He says, “Even though I didn’t do the actual choreography, I coordinated everything else. I made sure the palette of colors for the costumes worked together, found the choreographers and made sure there was continuity through the different sections.”
Chan is the choreographer for two of eight sections.
Wei Wang, a principal dancer with San Francisco Ballet who last year added choreography to his artistic endeavors, said Lustig invited him to make a section for the Angel Island Project.
“I’m doing the the story of Guok Shee, Wang explains, “who was the longest female detainee on the island, nearly 600 nights. Normally the men got released and passed through customs within a week or two and the women’s average was in three weeks. I saw that the museum on the island had so little information about her that I went online and did my research. Guok Shee actually had an inch thick of investigation files, and then still nobody talks about her.”
She was interrogated daily, Wang adds, and was subjected to daily medical exams that were meant to dehumanize her. “The data shows she had a serious depression,” Wang adds, “ and a mild mental disease from all that.”
“The story I’m trying to tell is so dark,” Wei admits, “it’s less spiritual, it’s more in the reality realm, so I want everything to look a little bit darker, a little bit more depressing for the audience. The whole point of having costumes and lighting is to support what you’re doing in movement. For my two piece I’m using exactly the same costume for both.”
The other choreographers for the Angel Island Project include Oakland Ballet dancers Lawrence Chen and Ashley Thopiah, and independent artists Feng Ye, Elaine Kudo. and Natasha Adorlee. Additional collaborators on it include former OBC member Alysia Chang together with Kaori Higashiyama (costume design), and Courtney Carson (lighting design).
OAKLAND BALLET
Presents “Angel Island Project” as part of Dancing Moons Festival
When: 3 p.m. May 4
Where: Paramount Theatre, 2025 Broadway, Oakland
Tickets: $43-$86 (subject to change); oaklandballet.org