Name: Angel Island
Start: 2024-01-13T00:00:00
Location: Brooklyn Academy of Music

Matthew Ozawa

Huang Ruo

Rena Butler

Beth Morrison Projects

The Choir of Trinity Wall Street

Between 1910 and 1940, many Chinese immigrants flowed through the immigration station on Angel Island inside San Francisco Bay, facing mass discrimination under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, with few exceptions. With music by acclaimed Chinese-American composer Huang Ruo, Angel Island revisits this chapter of American history with a poignant multimedia experience scored for voices and a string quartet that blurs the boundaries of opera, theater, dance, and music. Huang Ruo, along with director Matthew Ozawa, weaves a powerful requiem from the century-old poetry engraved on the detention center’s walls by some of the hundreds of thousands of incarcerated Chinese immigrants. Angel Island arrives amid an ongoing epidemic of brutal violence and rampant discrimination against immigrants, asylum-seekers, and Asians across the diaspora. This production is a stirring plea for care and empathy as well as a visceral, clear-eyed tribute to the rebellion and resilience of those who passed through and perished at Angel Island.