2025 Broadway Ave, Oakland
May 4, 2025
On the shores of the San Francisco Bay sits the Angel Island Immigration Station—a quiet sentinel to a turbulent chapter in American history. Between 1910 and 1940, more than one million people—primarily from Asian and Pacific Islander countries—were processed or detained there. Today its halls echo with poetry etched into the wooden walls by those once in their confines, with verses of longing, homesickness, and quiet defiance.
It is from these very poems that Oakland Ballet’s Angel Island Project draws its soul. Part of the Fourth Annual Dancing Moons Festival, the production, led by Artistic Director Graham Lustig and performed Sunday afternoon at Oakland’s Paramount Theater, transforms these immigrant voices into movement, music, and memory.
“They wrote their feelings, their emotions, their hopes, their dreams, and their frustrations on the bodies of the dancers who are going to be performing for you today,” said Lustig, addressing an audience that included descendants of former detainees.
Seven choreographers—Natasha Adorlee, Lawrence Chen, Feng Ye, Elaine Kudo, Ashley Thopiah, Wei Wang, and Phil Chan—each interpreted a historical poem into choreography, set to an oratorio by Chinese-born composer Huang Ruo and performed live by the Del Sol Quartet. A sixteen-member choir lent further resonance, singing the poems in both Mandarin and English.
The performance was both elegy and indictment, deeply relevant in today’s political climate. “That history is so important to preserve, even more so now, as we're seeing, unfortunately, an increase in racism and xenophobia across our country,” said Edward Tepporn, Executive Director of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, during a pre-show introduction. He continued, “While it's called the Angel Island Immigration Station—while some people might refer to it as the Ellis Island of the West—let's make no bones about that. It was a former detention center. A former detention center where especially Asian and Pacific Islander immigrants experienced unfair treatment and racist detention.”
Among the afternoon’s most arresting moments was choreographer Feng Ye’s piece (pictured at top). A ballerina emerged with a fragile wooden boat balanced delicately on her head, followed by a second dancer dragging a forty-foot-long braid. The hair, both beautiful and burdensome, represented a tether to home—an ancestral connection acting at once as ballast, trap, and, ultimately, cherished identity.
The finale by Phil Chan shows dancers emulating the waves of the ocean. The waves turn to people that continue to arrive and to flourish as generations through time. Each dancer sank to the fog-covered stage, transforming into mountains, unmoving and permanent.
With a run time of 80 minutes, Angel Island Project managed to animate history with powerful clarity. Through twelve dancers, a string quartet, and the haunting swell of a choir, the work illuminated one of America’s more shadowed stories, delivering it as a living, breathing, urgent call for recognition. With the withdrawals of NEA grants impacting the arts and immigrants facing new challenges every day, this production by the small yet immensely powerful Oakland Ballet team sent a message of just how important the arts are to expressing so many of the things that words cannot.
Learn more about Oakland Ballet on their website, and schedule a tour the Angel Island Immigration Station here.
