Theatre review: Total theatre Angel Island turns immigrants’ pain into something wondrous

Singapore International Festival of Arts Angel Island

Huang Ruo and Brian Gothong Tan
Singtel Waterfront Theatre
Friday (May 19)

From the moment Angel Island opens in the cavernous black space – the audience set about 10m back from the ground-level stage — it forces theatregoers to give it their rapt attention, with three to four points of focus at any one time.

An assault on the senses, New York-based Chinese composer Huang Ruo and Singaporean co-director Brian Gothong Tan’s Angel Island is also a production of astounding beauty, crafted from the pain of Chinese immigrants detained in a United States immigration facility between 1910 and 1940.

Not for Huang and Tan conventional theatre, but sung Chinese poems accompanied by a string quartet, dance and multimedia projections. This description, though, is a pale reflection of what actually transpires on the watery stage.

The central platform on which the musicians play is a nod to the Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, California. Barred from it, the chorus stands in the surrounding pool. The members huddle in solidarity, hem in the island in desperation and give their dead comrade a moving send-off.

By the fourth act, the meaning of Huang’s brainchild becomes clear: Far from just a mere recall of history, this is an act of transmutation.

Even the worst trauma can be corralled into wondrous, ethereal vocal slides and even the most heinous de-humanisation can be marshalled into a response that makes the spirit soar.

Angel Island is divided into eight acts, with the even number acts corresponding to four wen yan wen (classical Chinese) poems found carved on the barrack walls. The poems, lamentations of the immigrants’ fate, are set to spare string music played by the Del Sol Quartet, and sung by 15 singers from the Taipei Chamber Singers.

In these compositions, the words and phrases of the individual poems are echoed, harmonised and transposed in an extended vocal choreography, whether giving a sense of the expansive monotony and uncertain hope of “water” or to resemble breathless pants mid-sob.

There are no surtitles here and the words – along with their translation – can be found only in the programme booklet; Huang invites the audience to simply bask in the tide of sound and their unfamiliar lyricism.

Acts 1, 3, 5 and 7 are where the real tension can be found. Huang uses his two violins, viola and cello as percussive instruments, building syncopated beats through ostinato as real historical events are referred to on the screen.

Here, art is no longer shielding the reality of these racist pronouncements that provide historical structure to the immigrants’ experience. In Act V, the confused xenophobia of the 1873 tract The Chinese Invasion: Revealing The Habits, Manners And Customs Of The Chinese by Henry Josiah West is read aloud, with its warning that an unchecked Chinese population would lead to another civil war in the US.

In Act III, there is a description of the anti-Chinese Page Act of 1875, which operated on the assumption that Asian women looking to emigrate to the US were lying and most likely prostitutes. It is an apt reminder of the misogyny of these laws, which were formulated by white men and unevenly applied on Chinese men and women.

Music is but one element of this work of “total theatre”, and Tan’s multimedia is on inspired form here. In this Page Act scene, archival photos of immigrants with their unreadable expressions are paired with live footage of dancer Ma Yanling, marinating the interrogation of a Chinese woman in discomfort.

The choice to zoom in on her torturous, orgastic expressions, and for token white performer Jason Carter to operate the equipment, effectively capture the voyeuristic joy the official took in his questioning and the invasive scrutiny of his questions about family and morality.

It is also Tan’s porthole in Act II, as the immigrants traverse the ocean, that orientates the audience (a flying ship imbues this doomed adventure with some magic.) The unfurling of a lit screen later manages to create an illusionary extension of space in the dark Singtel Waterfront Theatre, immersing the gloom in an otherworldly hope.

This is a deeply personal work for Huang, who is himself a Chinese man living in New York.

In the programme notes, he says he has embedded some of the anti-Asian hate he felt during the pandemic into his writing. The experiences of Chinese immigrants in 20th-century US are also a present and universal one.

In this particular instance, though, Huang’s compositions and Tan’s direction have managed a remarkable act of posthumous restitution, even as the immigrants compare their travails to the futile toil of the Jing-wei bird, who tries to fill up the East Sea with rocks.

A century after the trauma of Angel Island, Huang and Tan have ushered them to land.

Book It / Angel Island

Where: Singtel Waterfront Theatre, 1 Esplanade Drive
When: May 20, 3 and 8pm
Admission: From $48
Info: 

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