When Lenora Lee, an artistic director, dancer and choreographer, debuted Within These Walls in 2017, she had no idea what the impact would be on the audience.
The immersive work was performed by a cast of 14 dancers on San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island, the site of the historic immigration station that enforced the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The performance reflected the experiences of 170,000 Chinese immigrants who were held on the island, some for months on end, and one person for nearly two years.
Dancers moved through the detention barracks and performed scenes critical to the detainees’ experiences, and the approximately 700 audience members could choose where to walk and which characters to follow.
“I think because the audience was physically in the same space as us, they could feel the experiences the characters were portraying,” said Lee. “Being able to share performance work in this way enables audience members to ask themselves: What is their role? Are they passive viewers? Are they participants? How can they discern what’s right and wrong for themselves? Can they do something about what’s happening? Many people told us that by just stepping into the station, they could feel the weight of history.”
On Feb. 23-26, UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies will present Within These Walls as the 2023 Berkeley Dance Project. It’s also part of the campuswide arts project A Year On Angel Island.
The Berkeley performance is the first time the entire work of Within These Walls will be performed on a theatrical stage, and it’s the first full-length project Lee has staged with university students.
“Their own creativity is unrestricted, and there’s a level of presence and openness that is so refreshing to see as they pursue their growth as artists,” she said.
It was as a student at UCLA that Lenora Lee started exploring her family’s past detainment at the U.S. Immigration Station on Angel Island through dance. In 2010, she created her first large-scale multimedia piece, with media designer and Berkeley alum Olivia Ting, called Passages: For Lee Ping To at Dance Mission Theater. It traced her maternal grandparents’ immigration journey from southern China to San Francisco, where they eventually settled.
The immigration station on San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island, in operation from 1910 to 1940, enforced the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The act was the first significant law restricting immigration to the U.S. and the first law to limit immigration based on race or nationality. It set a precedent for restrictive immigration of the country.
Over three decades, approximately 170,000 Chinese immigrants — many of whom were young laborers and farmers — and immigrants from dozens of other countries from around the world were detained on Angel Island. They were incarcerated in overcrowded detention barracks in harsh and unsanitary conditions as they waited to be processed. Detainees endured invasive medical exams and interrogations to verify their identities.
“The questioning was so in-detail that you might not know the answers, and you would be subject to speculation and deportation for failing to answer correctly,” said Lee. “For example, they might ask, ‘How many houses were in your village?’ or ‘How many steps is it from your front door to your well?’ Oftentimes, families had to borrow money from fellow villagers to pay for their passage overseas. For a boy who’s only 13, it’s very intimidating to be questioned in that intensity, and it was a lot of pressure because he didn’t want to get deported and let his village down.”
While detainees awaited processing and their verdict — if they could land or if they would be deported — some of them carved poetry in elegant strokes into the walls of the detention barracks. More than 200 poems on the walls tell stories of the lives and families the immigrants left behind. Of being imprisoned, looking through torn curtains at the island’s lush landscape, surrounded by an expansive bay. Of deep loneliness, and of uncertainty and anxiety about their fate.
These poems were discovered in 1970 by a California State Park ranger, and analyzed and translated by the local Asian American community. One of Lee’s collaborators on Within These Walls, poet and playwright Genny Lim, was instrumental — along with Him Mark Lai and Judy Yung — in compiling and translating these poems into the book ISLAND.
In 2017, Lee revisited the themes in Passages: For Lee Ping To and expanded the performance to create Within These Walls, a site-specific, immersive performance with a cast of 14 dancers. It debuted in September 2017 inside the Angel Island detention barracks, as part of a community-wide commemoration of the 135th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Multiple scenes were performed simultaneously throughout the barracks, and audience members could choose which characters to follow at any given moment.
“We recreated very important scenes that we felt were critical to the experience and to making visible the poetry on the walls,” Lee said. “Audience members were crying. There were audience members who wanted to interact and perhaps even stop what was going on. We were inviting them into the space as one of the detained. Many people told us that by just stepping into the station, they could feel the weight of this history.”
Now, Lee is restaging Within These Walls for the 2023 Berkeley Dance Project presented by the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. Each of the 14 student-dancers embodies a character. Some of the characters are based on real people, including Lee’s maternal grandmother, Lee Ping To, and advocate Penelope Wong’s father, Wong Gung Jue, both of whom were processed on Angel Island. During the performance, images of immigration photos and documents, along with doctor and interrogation scenes filmed underwater, will be projected onto the walls and onto large pieces of fabric with poetry painted on them.
The Berkeley performance is part of a yearlong, campuswide project by Berkeley Arts+Design and Future Histories Lab: A Year on Angel Island. The project is sponsoring a series of music and dance performances, exhibitions and public conversations, using Angel Island’s immigration station as a jumping-off point to start discussions about race, global migration and architectures of incarceration.