Oakland Ballet DANCING MOONS FESTIVAL Returns This Spring

Oakland Ballet Company has announced the program for its fourth Dancing Moons Festival, an annual celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander artists. This year the company premieres a major new work inspired by the lives of detainees at Angel Island, the United States' main immigration facility on the West Coast from 1910 to 1940.

In collaboration with the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation and Angel Island Parks and Recreation, the ANGEL ISLAND PROJECT features the work of seven choreographers including Natasha Adorlee, Phil Chan, Lawrence Chen, Feng Ye, Elaine Kudo, Ashley Thopiah, and Wei Wang.

In advance of the premiere on Sunday, May 4 at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, Oakland Ballet Company will present an introduction to the Angel Island Project at the very site of the work's inspiration, the Angel Island Immigration Station. This hourlong event will include a short lecture by Ed Tepporn, executive director of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, on the history of the station, followed by a preview performance of the Angel Island Project. A short Q&A with the artists concludes the event.

This preview event will take place on the final two Saturdays in March: March 22 and 29 at 12:45 p.m. Due to the constraints of the site, audiences are limited to 70 people. Tickets, $67 - $75, are now on sale at oaklandballet.org/performances-events/angel_island_project. Ferry passage to Angel Island must be purchased separately.

At the premiere in May, Oakland Ballet Company will be accompanied by the Del Sol Quartet, under the direction of Charlton Lee, and members of Volti, a choral ensemble, under the direction of Robert Geary. Dr. Wei Cheng will conduct. Tickets, $43 – $86, are now on sale.

Featuring an 80-minute oratorio scored for string quartet, 16 singers and a narrator, the music, commissioned by Del Sol in 2020, was composed by Huang Ruo, “one of the world's leading young composers” (The New Yorker), whose work draws equal inspiration from Chinese ancient and folk music, Western avant-garde, experimental, noise, natural and processed sound, rock and jazz. Born and raised in China, Ruo currently resides in New York City where he teaches at the Mannes School of Music. This fall, the San Francisco Opera will premiere Ruo's newest opera, The Monkey King.

"With captured imaginations, we take flight on a journey of discovery and storytelling shaped by a beautiful score by Chinese American composer Huang Ruo, and the inspired poetry that was carved into the walls by detainees at the Angel Island Immigration Station,” said Oakland Ballet Artistic Director Graham Lustig. “The Angel Island Project helps trace who we all are today by remembering our origins and the many perilous journeys made by our ancestors."

CHOREOGRAPHERS

Natasha Adorlee is an Emmy Award-winning choreographer, filmmaker, composer and educator based in San Francisco. A first-generation Asian American, Adorlee began her career as a choreographer and filmmaker while dancing with ODC/Dance, where she performed for almost a decade. As a choreographer, she has received commissions from Joffrey Ballet, Ceprodac (Mexico), Kawaguchi Ballet (Japan), Ballare Carmel, Ballet22 and Amy Sewiert's Imagery. Outside of dance, Adorlee has created original work for Pixar Animation Studios, Occulus, National Geographic, and the New Yorker. Under the banner of Concept o4, Adorlee creates multimedia dance-based experiences advocating for more accessibility in the arts.

Phil Chan is a choreographer, director and ballet scholar who eight years ago decided to turn a longstanding frustration into a wellspring of activism. Together with prima ballerina Georgina Pazcoguin Chan founded Final Bow for Yellowface, an organization that works with ballet companies in America and Europe to eliminate offensive depictions of Asians in their repertoires and help them find inventive and respectful ways to stage culturally problematic ballet classics. Chan distills their ethos and tactics in his book Final Bow for Yellow Face: Dancing Between Intention and Impact. As a director and choreographer, Chan has put his own stamp on once-problematic Orientalist standards. In 2023, he directed Madama Butterfly at Boston Lyric Opera in a production that The Boston Globe called “an invigorating and meaningful reclamation of Puccini's beloved opera.” Last year he restaged, together with Doug Fullington, La Bayadère at Indiana University, maintaining Marius Petipa's choreography but moving the setting from a 19th-century India sprung from a European imagination to the homegrown American exoticism of 1920s Hollywood. In 2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned him to create a work inspired by a lost 18th-century ballet, reimagining its story from a new perspective. Titled Ballet des Porcelaines or The Teapot Prince, the original story is an Orientalist fairy tale created for European consumption. Oakland Ballet presented the West Coast premiere of Chan's ballet in 2022.

Lawrence Chen grew up in Southern California, studying ballet, contemporary and hip-hop under the care of Victor and Tatiana Kasatsky and their faculty from the age of thirteen. He went on to compete in the YAGP, placing in the Top 12 Pas De Deux in the New York Finals of 2014 as well as in the Top 3 soloists at regional venues for several years. At Pomona College, Chen obtained a BA in chemistry with mathematics, took on collegiate ballroom, and performed as a principal dancer for the Inland Pacific Ballet under the watchful eye of Victoria Koenig. In addition to dancing with the OBC, Chen teaches ballet and tutors high school STEM subjects. At OBC, he has performed as the deer dancer in Graham Lustig's Luna Mexicana and in the title role of The Nutcracker. Lawrence has also been featured in new works by choreographers Caili Quan, Megan and Shannon Kurashige, and Phil Chan. Chen received an Izzie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Performance by an Individual for his work in OBC's 2022-23 season.

Feng Ye is a “National First-Class Dancer” in China. She served as artistic director and president of the China National Song and Dance Troupe. As a choreographer, her works have been presented in the Olympic opening & closing ceremonies three times – in 2004, 2008 and 2014. In the South Bay Area, Feng Ye launched the Feng Ye Dance Studio and Feng Ye Dance Troupe and successfully produced and performed a grand annual gala entitled Encounter at the San Jose Art Center Montgomery Theater in 2018 and Dance with Nature at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco in 2019. For three consecutive years, the Feng Ye Dance Troupe was selected as the only representative of Chinese dance to participate in the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival. Feng Ye has emerged as an important figure in the region, promoting the integration of dance cultures from multiple ethnic groups.

Elaine Kudo was a member of American Ballet Theatre company from 1975 to 1989. She danced soloist and principal roles in a wide range of works mostly in the contemporary repertory. She has had the honor of working with choreographers Anthony Tudor, Jerome Robbins, Glen Tetley, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Eugene Loring and Sir. Kenneth MacMillan, Twyla Tharp, Lynn Taylor-Corbett, Chu San Gogh and David Gordon. Directly after her retirement from the stage in 1990, Kudo began staging the works of Twyla Tharp, nationally and abroad, and she continues to be one of the primary stagers of Tharp's repertory. Kudo also served as ballet master for the New Jersey Ballet, American Repertory Ballet and most recently Washington Ballet. Together with Buddy Balough, she founded and directed Theatre Arts Dance. Among her other credits, Kudo served on the faculty of American Ballet Theatre's summer intensive program, Ballet Tech, the Contemporary Traditions Program at Jacob's Pillow, Princeton Ballet School and Steps on Broadway.

Ashley Thopiah received her BFA in Dance Performance from Butler University. She began her dance training at the Christine Rich Dance Academy and furthered her training in summer programs at State Street Ballet, Joffrey Ballet and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. At Butler, Thopiah performed corps, soloist and principal roles in Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Giselle, La Bayadère, Cinderella, and George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments. As a choreographer, Thopiah created two works for Butler University's dance department, Jyoti and Ekta. Using both modern dance and Bharatanatyam, a form of classical Indian dance, she expresses the two distinct but intertwined aspects of her identity. During the summer of 2018, Ekta was performed in the National Opera House in Warsaw, Poland, across Prague, Krakow, Poznan, and Bratislava. Joining OBC in 2019, she created the role of Coffee in The Nutcracker, as well as featured roles in The Birthdays, 4 Parts Jazz by Alyah Baker, Club LC by Bobby Briscoe, and Phil Chan's quartet and Seyong Kim's duet from Exquisite Corpse.

Wei Wang, born in 1992 in Liaoning, China, is an accomplished dancer and choreographer with a distinguished career in ballet. After graduating from the Beijing Dance Academy in 2011, he moved to the United States to study at the San Francisco Ballet School, where he began his professional journey in 2012 as an apprentice with the company. His exceptional talent and dedication led to his promotion to soloist in 2015, and he made history in 2018 as the first Chinese male principal dancer at SF Ballet. Throughout his career at the SF Ballet, Wang has performed principal roles in renowned full-length ballets including Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Nutcracker, Frankenstein, Giselle and Raymonda. His artistry has been showcased in original roles created by esteemed choreographers such as Aszure Barton, William Forsythe, Liam Scarlett, Yuri Possikhov, Helgi Tommasson, Christopher Wheeldon and Justin Peck. As a choreographer, Wang has created several works, including Focus, a piece for the SF Ballet trainee program, a pas de deux titled Silent Woods, performed at the Festival Mosaic with cellist Johan Kim, Reminiscence, a solo for the Napa Valley Festival, and Aphrodisia, a dance film created in collaboration with the Marsh Theater for the Festival of New Musical Voices.

Additional collaborators on the Angel Island Project include former OBC member Alysia Chang together with Kaori Higashiyama (costume design), and Courtney Carson (lighting design).

ABOUT OAKLAND BALLET COMPANY

For 59 years, Oakland Ballet Company has inspired the East Bay community and beyond by keeping the art of ballet exciting, relevant and accessible, primarily through the presentation of works of the Diaghilev repertoire and modern masterpieces. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Graham Lustig, the Company has renewed its commitment to artistic excellence with imaginative programs that engage contemporary audiences through close relationships with living choreographers, the commissioning of new works, innovative collaborations with diverse artists and communities, and compelling educational programs that cultivate the next generation of dance lovers.

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