When Chinese migrants were lynched on US tracks

Huang Ruo’s Angel Island is a challenging new opera, reviewed for slippedisc.com by Susan Hall:

Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Prototype Festival are presenting Angel Island, the most recent opera, or vocal theater, created by composer Huang Ruo. Each of his operas is constructed to suit its theme. Here notes find a surprise origin in both cruel description and hope.

Often Huang Ruo takes the traditional elements of opera and turns them on their collective heads. This innovation gives the pleasure of seeing familiar opera forms and the thrill of finding them freshly imagined.

Angel Island is in eight parts. Documentary materials are read to an underlying musical drone which emphasizes the knee-jerk monumental acts of cruelty America has inflicted on its minorities over the centuries. These alternate with beautiful choral tones lofting poems etched into the wooden walls of a detention center by confused and fearful immigrants waiting to be admitted to the US mainland. Immigrants were confused because Chinese men were welcomed as cheap labor building the transcontinental railroad. After the railroad was completed, they were no longer wanted. In fact, the fear of the Yellow Peril intensified over the years. Recently a US President blamed the Covid epidemic on an Asian Yellow Peril.

Trinity Choir sings and also functions as a choreographed, moving set created by Riw Rakkulchon. The singers arrive in long black tulle robes, ghosts from the past. Weathered shirts and skirts by designer Ashley Salimon are soon revealed.

Benjamin Freemantle and Jie-Hung Connie Shiau, two dancers who would have performed as incidental figures in traditional opera, now tell the story in dramatic gestures at the front of the stage. Wrenching scenes depict abuse and rape. Ms. Shiau represents the immigrants; Mr Freemantle is harbor master, immigration officer and representative bad guy.

The backdrop is a see-through scrim that rolls up to reveal the composer conducting the Del Sol Quartet who commissioned this work. The rear stage wall is filled with the indelible images of filmmaker Bill Morrison, taking us to Angel Island, the largest landmass in the San Francisco Bay, bigger than Alcatraz.

Matthew Ozawa directs a mix of dance, music, song and visual images. He is a master storyteller, who evokes deep feelings. Yuki Nakse Link spots highlights, sometimes bathed in blood red.

While this story remembers historical events, Huang Ruo’s music keeps the listener in the moment. Names are listed. Not the innocent list of a roll call, but a list like the memorial recitations of those killed by terrorists on 9/11. We hear the names of 15 Asians lynched and hanged in Los Angeles. Lists are drones, but carefully individuated ones. Huang Ruo creates a tingling edge and an irresistible beat.

Of the many powerful images director Matthew Ozawa and choreographer Rena Butler bring to the stage, perhaps the most jarring is the famed Trinity choir huddled together, recalling Emma Lazarus’s ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’.These words were written by Lazarus in 1883, a year after the Chinese Exclusion Act was signed by President Chester A. Arthur.

Most white European immigrants to the better known Ellis Island in New York were welcomed. In the final two sections of Angel Island, we are introduced to the six Chinese survivors of the sunk Titanic. They were dumped at Ellis Island and refused medical treatment on the mainland because they were Chinese. Morrison has pictured the massive rock that is Angel Island and then gives us the iceberg that crushed the Titanic. Both are beautiful images to look at and yet hold rejection and death at their centers.

This work ends with the beats of a pealing gong, perched in a box at the theater. It could be a buoy in a harbor, calling out to new immigrants and also sadly accompanying their enforced exodus. It could be the carillon of a church tower, reminding us that all humans have the right to respect. It is Huang Ruo’s version of chimes, heavy and infused with pathos. To its beats, the Choir moves from the stage into the audience. The gong’s peals fade, hopefully a death knell for the racial discrimination so dramatically presented in Angel Island.