January 11–13, 2024
Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music
Brooklyn, New York – USA
Huang RUO: Angel Island
Presenter: Brooklyn Academy of Music and Prototype Festival. Huang Ruo, composer/conductor; Matthew Ozawa, director. Cast: Jie-Hung Connie Shiau; Benjamin Freemantle; Choir of Trinity Wall Street, Del Sol Quartet. Creative: Rena Butler, choreographer; Bill Morrison, film; Riw Rakkulchon, scenic design; Ashley Soliman, costumer design; Yuki Nakase Link, lighting design.
Ben Gambuzza | 15 JAN 2024
Thursday evening, to buzzing anticipation and riotous applause, Chinese-American composer Huang Ruo conducted the New York premiere of his opera-theater work, Angel Island, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s paint-chipped Harvey Theater as part of the Prototype Festival.
The mixed media composition, employing voiceover, choir, film, string quartet, and dance, recounts the history of anti-Chinese legislation in this country during the latter part of the nineteenth century through the poetry of immigrants who scribbled verses on the walls of the Angel Island detention center in San Francisco Bay, where the US government held them for sometimes years on end in brutal conditions.
Ruo’s work premiered on the eponymous island in 2021.
Since the central tension in the work is how different perspectives clash and jibe with one another – the pleas of the detainees versus the racist vitriol of Henry Josiah West[1] for example – it makes sense that Ruo chose to use “two parallel tracks,” as he puts it in a program note, to structure the work.
The first track, for narration and string quartet (here, the San Francisco-based Del Sol Quartet), comprises four scenes and focuses on the greater historical context – the Page Act of 1875 (prohibiting the entry of Chinese women based on the assumption that they all become sex workers), the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (barring all Chinese immigrants except those of the professional classes), and other unfortunate milestones.
The second track, for vocal ensemble (here, the expert, though treble-heavy, Choir of Trinity Wall Street) and string quartet, also comprises four scenes and takes four poems from the Angel Island detention center walls as its text. “Here, several hundreds of my countrymen are like fish caught in a net,” one begins.
But the whole work began in silence as the dancer Jie-Hung Connie Shiau approached a spotlit chair in the middle of the stage and sat down, old-fashioned cargo trunks by her feet, recalling, it seemed, the intake procedure at an immigration facility. A news report of the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871 scrolled on the screen behind her. The screen would soon show historical footage of Chinese immigrants sauntering into captivity at Angel Island.
With the graceful, eye-catching Benjamin Freemantle, Shiau played one character in a voiceless duo who enacted a creepy yet oddly sensual dance that ran throughout the work. Replete with flips, splits, spins, and caresses, their performance was a perennial reminder of how white men have exploited Asian women in this country through interpersonal objectification as well as legislative discrimination.
Angel Island: Benjamin Freemantle and Jie-Hung Connie Shiau. (credit: Ellen Qbertplaya)
But the duo was just one action among many on stage. Grounding the whole performance was the Del Sol Quartet, which began by humming out long, staggered, pulsating chords, creating a staticky, sealike texture and anxious, foreboding atmosphere – somewhere between Debussy’s Nocturnes and the Das Rheingold vorspiel. In other words, Wagner-lite.
The quartet moved into more rhythmic territory toward the end, reminding me especially of Steve Reich’s Different Trains, so groovily syncopated was the music during the seventh scene, “The Last Chinaman From The Titanic.”
But my impression of the total sum of the music was that it was too intense for too long. I am not sure that the musicians, capable and evocative as they were, could have helped this. Few ensembles can sustain a fever-pitch level of anxiety for so long that its effect remains impressive. That’s one of the challenges of minimalistic pieces like Terry Riley’s In C or Philip Glass’ Piano Etudes.
In fact, there were so few spots of musical respite (there was not even applause between scenes) that I grew weary of listening and reluctantly let my attention wander to look at my fellow concertgoers who, it should be said, looked entranced.
Some of these moments of respite were given by the choir, who sang in the original Chinese of the poems. I was refreshed by how Ruo wrote for voice. He again made Debussy’s Nocturnes enter my mind – this time, the entrancing vocal writing of “Sirènes.” As the choir chanted monosyllables, I heard echoes of Stravinsky’s Les noces. And as they stacked their entrances on top of each other, I was lulled as if by Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli. The singers were gentle and passionate, declaiming the text like they had written the poetry themselves.
Jie-Hung Connie Shiau (top center) and the chorus in a scene from Huang Ruo’s “Angel Island” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. (credit: Ellen Qbertplaya)
Their dedication came to the fore as they processed up the aisles into the audience, signaling their departure from America in the last scene, “The Ocean Encircles a Lonely Peak.” In an ominous prediction of the falcon who cannot hear his falconer of W. B. Yeats’ 1919 poem, “The Second Coming,” the choir sang:
The wild goose messenger cannot find its way.
They continued to chant as a giant gong, positioned in an upper box, drowned this ceremony of innocence in a cloak of resonant sorrow.
And that’s how Angel Island ends.
A scene from Huang Ruo’s “Angel Island” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. (credit: Ellen Qbertplaya)
Despite top-flight performances by all involved, especially the dancers and, by extension, their choreographer, Rena Butler, there was a stasis about Ruo’s music and the story he told that was intriguing at first but soon became tiring. Perhaps it’s cultural, and my Western desire for a straight narrative with a beginning and end is clouding my judgment. But I can’t help but think that the funereal mood that characterized the whole thing, from beginning to end, could have been relieved by greater exploration of the individual characters Shiau and Freemantle played.
The music of Angel Island turned and turned as if in a widening gyre, but, for this critic, the center did not hold. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Brooklyn Academy of Music: bam.org/
- Huang Ruo: huangruo.com
- Del Sol Quartet: delsolquartet.com
- The Choir of Trinity Wall Street: trinitywallstreet.org/music/ensembles/the-choir-trinity-wall-street
- [1] Henry Josiah West: The Chinese invasion, 1873 (WorldCat® library search)
Read more by Ben Gambuzza.
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