Oakland Chinatown's Lantern Festival
Pacific Renaissance Plaza, Oakland
March 1st, 2026
The Lantern Festival for the Year of the Fire Horse began with joy, dance, and song, all courtesy of Megan Lowe Dances, or MLD. This company has a gift for transforming spaces and the ordinary everyday objects in them, like benches, in this instance those of the Pacific Renaissance Plaza, into a dynamic landscape of athleticism and art.
The company performed pieces dedicated to honoring and amplifying stories collected from Chinatown, translating them into art and movement that pay tribute to the community. Ài Yīn Adelski opened the program with a full body warm up, encouraging a responsive crowd to move gently with intention and grace. Frances Teves Sedayao followed, her irrepressible joy blanketing the group as she led them through a line dance that, by the end, looked like a well practiced flash mob. Brenton Cheng sustained the high energy, and Megan Lowe brought the first half to a close with percussive movement and a song she had written.
For the second part of the program, MLD asked that the benches around the central fountain be cleared. Moving with precision, the four dancers took turns leaping and twisting around the plaza in a blur of strength and control. Dancers were lifted skyward. Benches were investigated as gently as a butterfly before becoming springboards from which a dancer would explode away. At times they moved in unison, eyes fixed on the same faraway point, and at others they inhabited separate corners of the plaza, each in a world of their own. The plaza became their stage, no part left untouched, stretching from the edges of the fountain to the tops of the benches and the expressive capacity of their own bodies. More than once, a dancer fell backward in what looked like a weightless free fall, only to be caught at the last moment. It takes remarkable skill and trust to be part of MLD, and that trust, along with a deep care for one another and for the communities they work within, was palpable. The message resonated clearly: history must be remembered, and there is always a place for each person within a community.
All of this unfolded to music layered with stories Roy Chan collected as part of the Oakland Chinatown Oral History Project, OCOHP. Personal and neighborhood stories gathered over the past two decades formed an aural backdrop of lived experience. These personal histories, key historical moments, and vivid memories of place are an oral archive of the community.
MLD has long challenged assumptions about where and how dance can happen, whether they perform at the Legion of Honor, Fort Mason, a San Francisco trolley, or a plaza in the heart of Oakland’s Chinatown. Amid artisans, food stalls, and shops at the Lantern Festival, held on the fifteenth day of the new year of the Fire Horse, these dancers commanded the crowd’s attention while lifting the collective mood. It set an exuberant tone for the celebration.
MLD will next perform at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on May 15-17 with its show Air Between Us.
