Dancing Moons festival a love letter to Asian American artists
Oakland Ballet presents a program of new works by five dance-makers
Alarmed by the rise of attacks on Asian Americans, both in the Bay Area and globally, Oakland Ballet's artistic director Graham Lustig jumped into action to address the issue through dance.
In collaboration with the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, he initiated the Dancing Moons Festival with performances in Oakland and Livermore between today and April 2. It brings together the work of five dance-makers, giving audiences the opportunity to see Asians as performers, choreographers, composers and designers.
With 30 years' experience as a principal dancer (now retired) and choreographer with Oakland Ballet, Michael Lowe was an obvious choice to take part. The East Bay native with Chinese and Korean heritage, who has contributed a new dance to the program, is no newcomer to bringing Asian themes and music to the stage.
“After dancing Chinese tea in `Nutcracker' and a Chinese doll in `Coppélia,' the first time I attempted to break the stereotypical portrayal of Asians was back in 1993 when I did the `Emperor and the Nightingale,' ” Lowe recalls. “Nobody at that time even wanted to show authentic Chinese people.”
In 2003 he won an Isadora Duncan Dance Award for choreography for his ballet “Bamboo.”
“I was really pushing the music of the ensemble Melody of China,” he says. “A lot of my colleagues would say, `Can't you find something by Stravinsky or Tchaikovsky?' It's very difficult music for Westerners, but we made it work.”
For his new piece in the Dancing Moons program, Lowe says “there is pipa and other Chinese instrumentation, and also piano.” The new work, “Ebb-tide,” for six dancers, was inspired by his mother's watercolors.
Another pair of choreographers contributing to Dancing Moons are Megan and Shannon Kurashige, founders and directors of their own San Franciscobased contemporary dance company, Sharp & Fine. They are from a Japanese family, who after generations of living in Hawaii, relocated to California, where the sisters were born.
Shannon Kurashige says that “when we were younger we didn't super-identify as being Japanese because we were so very Americanized. But more recently we realized that even if you're not making overtly Asian work, you are all your history. The things you did in the family and all the cultural practices that you don't even realize are cultural practices, come out. Japanese people in Hawaii practice very differently from those in Japan, or even those in Brazil.”
The duo is choreographing a quartet, consisting of two couples. “For this piece,” Megan Kurashige says, “we feel that it's fun to open the door for all our collaborators and dancers to bring their own histories to the work.”
Another Dancing Moons contributor, Hong Kongborn choreographer Phil Chan, moved to Berkeley at age 10 and began studying ballet. He won a scholarship to the Alvin Ailey school in New York City, where he now lives.
In 2017 he co-founded Final Bow for Yellowface to confront the racist portrayal of Asian characters in classical ballet.
Chan recalls, “People were coming up to me all the time saying, `How do I fix my “Nutcracker”? Can you take a look and see if it's racist or not?' ”
He decided to write a book to free himself from that consulting work and have time to choreograph. The book also questions “the Eurocentric nature of ballet and the way we look at other cultures in our repertory strictly from a European perspective.”
Chan was commissioned last year by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to reimagine a work originally created in 1739 titled “Ballet des Porcelaines” (The Teapot Prince). With an all-Asian production team and dancers, Chan's version turns a ballet that personifies the 18th-century's distorted view of Orientalism and allows the characters to emerge as human beings, not caricatures.
The work makes its West Coast premiere at the Dancing Moons Festival, along with a new pas de deux set to original music by Huang Ruo and performed live by the internationally celebrated concert pianist Min Kwon.
Rounding out the group of choreography contributors is Caili Quan, originally from the island of Guam.
“I'm Quan from Guam,” she says with a laugh. “Quan is clearly Chinese, but now after five generations of intermarriage it is considered to be a Chamorro (the indigenous people of Guam) local family name.”
She originally planned a work “very much inspired by my mother and her upbringing in the Filipino culture.” But now she is creating a trio for three women en pointe, set to three songs, one each from from the Philippines, the Cook Islands and Tahiti.
“Even though I grew up on Guam and none of the music is very much my identity, I felt very emotionally attached to it. It weaves all the different parts of my identity into one.”