The last person rescued from the Titanic was named Wing Son Fong. After being pulled from the ocean him and five other Chinese survivors were detained, denied entry, and sent back toward the ocean (him to Cuba). It is a fact from the opera Angel Island that hits me with a hundred questions. I had no idea that walking into the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s satellite theater tonight was going to be such an important education.
The opera delves into the circumstances that result in Wing Son Fong’s denial of entry beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law enacted after years of prejudice toward Chinese citizens who emigrated to The United States. The tapestry of history is made of many threads, Some like Wing’s thread become a history onto themselves.
The exposed brick and pipes of the Harvey Theater look like a reappropriated ruin, a perfect frame for the history of Angel Island and its accompanying photography exhibit.
The program notes accompanying the opera read:
“The first restrictive immigration law, the Page Act of 1875, denied entry of Chinese women under the pretext that any East Asian woman who arrived would be engaging in prostitution. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act expanded the ban to include Chinese men as well. The Exclusion Act was the first, and remains the only, law to have been implemented to prevent ALL members of a specific ethnic or national group from immigrating to the United States.” After the law many Chinese immigrants from 1910-1940 were detained on Angel Island.“Sometimes [they were held] up to years in brutal conditions at the detention center, many of these immigrants looked for solace by inscribing poetry onto the walls of the center.” The words for today’s show come from this history and these poems.
The opera Angel Island is rich in Sonic beauty and poetic euphony delivered on oceans of harmony.
At times it’s difficult for me to parse the lovely sound and wonderful production with its content. I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately, the aesthetic vehicle of ‘art’ to communicate hard realities, especially with so many artists feeling the pressure to have social commentary within their work. It makes me think of Keats line from Ode to a Grecian Urn reflecting on Plato and Aristotle. “Beauty is truth, truth (is) beauty. that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”
The opera is beautiful, but does that beauty derive from the form or the truth or within the tension between the two?
A constant focal point of the opera is on the dancer Jie-Hung Connie Shiau who begins the story as a contemporary character looking through boxes of ephemera from Angel Island. What she sees and reads manifests through her tendons and muscles in an indefatigable expression of her ancestors story through dance for the next hour and a half.
The guard played by Benjamin Freemantle who also dances with a wow factor is often her counterpart while the two of them navigate both the attraction and repulsion of two cultures coming together. It’s all very effecting and as always I’m just confounded by the lithe powerful metaphor that dance can be on the right legs.
The chorus that join her provide a constant harmony heard so beautiful together, yet with individual and underlying pains. The chorus collaboration is sung by the Del sol quartet.
Like open wounds society has to live with the histories it doesn’t know. I was completely ignorant of this history before today. Seeing a show like this sometimes leaves me to wonder what responsibility comes with new knowledge as I walk away from these socially conscious art exhibits and shows. What do the artists want me to feel or to do tomorrow and the days after.
As a teacher I interact with many people and wrestle with saying and doing the right things for my students and community. This show will stay with me forever I don’t doubt, changing the way I think about laws, voting, and treating others how I would like to be treated.
For the finale the singers break the fourth wall and join the audience on the stairs while a gong is repeatedly struck from the second balcony until its noise eventually diminishes to end the show. Like a clock the residual sound of the bell marks time for me.
With the stall following that final strike, there is time to breathe and celebrate, to think about the beauty of art as a tool of expression and vessel for knowledge.
Then collective applause.
Notes on the Production: