Immigrants’ torment re-created as art
Lenora Lee’s immersive dance performance on Angel Island takes place over only four days, and Josh Bretholtz has already been there for two of them. “Within These Walls,” Lee’s multimedia, multilayered performance piece, was presented at the island’s Immigration Station Saturday and Sunday, Sept.910, and it continues this weekend. “It’s so fabulous that I had to come back,” gushed Bretholtz. “It’s almost a ‘choose your own adventure’ dance.”
Lee’s concept for “Within These Walls” is complex and powerful. Eleven dancers represent some of the approximately 170,000 Chinese immigrants who passed through Angel Island — the “Ellis Island of the West” — between 1910 and 1940, including three of Lee’s grandparents. Their performances take place in the very location it’s meant to represent, giving “Within These Walls” an intense and authentic quality.
Twice a day, four times a weekend, Lee’s dancers interpret the often-painful immigrant experience of detention. Attendees, those of us who’ve already ferried to the island and shuttled or hiked the 1½-mile trek to the Immigration Station, were initially treated like immigrants ourselves. We were lined up in rows of two and made to stand on the station’s entrance stairs while instructions — real instructions on how to behave during the performance — were shouted by “guards.” The whole process of seeing Lee’s show is a very literal journey, both physically and emotionally.
Dancers begin to move as the performance — and thus our “detention” — began. The ticket-holding crowd of about 50 people followed the dancers into the Immigration Station, a museum in its own right that is closed to outside visitors during performance times. Once inside, we could follow any dancer we wished as each wordlessly struggled through being detained. Sometimes the members of Lee’s dance company performed in pairs or in groups; other times the dancers were painfully alone. As Bretholtz said, one can choose which dancer’s story to follow and move with them throughout the grounds.
Haunting original music from composer Francis Wong was played over a collection of institutional loudspeakers, interspersed with poetry and spoken word written by Genny Lim and Wong Gung Jue. Across the walls splashed a series of projections created by media designer Olivia Ting. From the speakers, we could hear guards demand answers to actual questions asked of immigrants, such as, “Do you believe in an organized overturn of a government?” or “Have your mother’s feet always been unbound?”
Throughout the hour-long performances both inside and outside the main Immigration Station building, dancers passed secret notes while others staged a failed escape attempt. In one scene, an interrogator played by a white guard gestured in rigid movements. A translator then communicated to the immigrant with broad, round, organic moves — the fluid native tongue contrasted to the jarring foreign English. The scene was at once beautiful and terrifying, at times frustrating and confusing for the audience, as it must have been for Lee’s grandparents.
“Oh, they never talked about it,” said Lee’s mother, JoAnn, shielding her eyes with a bright floral sun hat. Both of JoAnn Lee’s parents came to the United States through Angel Island’s Immigration Station, albeit separately. “They were afraid to talk about it because they bought their papers. And look at what’s happening now.”
Bretholtz mirrored Lee’s reference to the current political climate, which both found to be anti-immigrant. “We’re all immigrants, really,” he said, patting his young daughter on the head. “The echoes of what went on here are happening all over the country.”
Lee spent exhaustive hours researching her grandparents and their fellow immigrants, each of whom spent weeks, months and even years stuck on Angel Island. Their drawn-out detentions, usually much longer than the typical two- or three-day detentions for immigrants from other countries, were largely due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a law that prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the United States.
Scenes at the water’s edge were particularly touching. Four women danced in unison as sailboats floated by, driving home the proximity but intangibility of freedom. The dancers then returned to their dormitories, stoically passing through their first audience of the day as if we were invisible witnesses to an injustice we couldn’t control.
No matter which dancer one was following, “Within These Walls” culminated in a heartbreaking finale in the recreation yard, a sundrenched acrobatic feat that left just about every performer covered in sweat. The dancers took a bow and were excused to prepare for the day’s second performance. The rest of us made our way to back to the island’s docks, onto ferries and back to freedom.
Lee began work on “Within These Walls” in January and hopes to create a multimedia video of the performance. For now, though, Lee is focused on the logistics of coordinating a dance premiere in an intensely rustic and historic environment. “I have to go,” she explained, slowly stepping away. “One of my crew members got stung by a bee.”