Angel Island
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. 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.
Produced by Beth Morrison Projects in association with Brooklyn Academy of Music. Commissioned by Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions / Del Sol Quartet with a completion commission by Singapore International Festival of Art
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Huang Ruo (Composer & Conductor)
Matthew Ozawa (Director)
Bill Morrison (Film Designer)
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Huang Ruo (Composer & Conductor)
Huang Ruo (Composer and Conductor) has been lauded by The New York Times for having “a distinctive style.” His vibrant and inventive musical voice draws equal inspiration from Chinese ancient and folk music, Western avant-garde, experimental, noise, natural and processed sound, rock, and jazz to create a seamless, organic integration using a compositional technique he calls “Dimensionalism.” Huang Ruo’s diverse compositional works span from orchestra, chamber music, opera, theater, and dance, to cross-genre, sound installation, architectural installation, multimedia, experimental improvisation, folk rock, and film. His music has been performed by the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Evelenad Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Santa Fe Opera, Washington National Opera, Seattle Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Royal Danish Opera, Asko/Schoenberg, Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta. He has written 9 operas including M. BUTTERFLY, BOOK OF MOUNTAINS AND SEAS, ANGEL ISLAND, and AN AMERICAN SOLDIER, which was named one of the best classical music events in 2018 by The New York Times. He served as the first composer-in-residence for Het Concertgebouw Amsterdam. Huang Ruo was born in Hainan Island, China in 1976 – the year the Chinese Cultural Revolution ended. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s when China was opening its gate to the Western world, his education expanded from Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky, and Lutoslawski, to include the Beatles, rock and roll, heavy metal, and jazz. Huang Ruo is a composition faculty at the Mannes School of Music. Huang Ruo’s music is published by EAM/SCHOTT.
Matthew Ozawa (Director)
Matthew Ozawa (Director) is a stage director, executive leader, artistic director, and educator who has firmly cemented himself as one of the preeminent creative forces in the opera world today. Most recently, Ozawa was appointed as the Chief Artistic Administration Officer at Lyric Opera of Chicago, a new role that will oversee all of Lyric’s artistic planning, processes, and activities. As a stage director, Ozawa is known as a master storyteller, whose “strikingly spare productions” (New York Times) are “a vivid demonstration of what opera is all about” (Opera News). His productions consistently “deliver brilliance on all fronts” (Chicago Tribune) and are filled with “breathtaking imagery” (Broadway World). Passionate about collaborative interdisciplinary performance, new work, and reigniting classics, Ozawa’s “stylish” and “intelligent” new productions have been seen at Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Houston Grand Opera, and Santa Fe Opera among many others. Committed to new and modern work, recent new production highlights include Ruo / Huang’s An American Soldier (Opera Theatre of St. Louis), Perla / Murphy’s An American Dream (Lyric Opera of Chicago), Aucoin’s Second Nature (Lyric Opera of Chicago), and Hanlon / Fleischmann’s After The Storm (Houston Grand Opera).
www.matthewozawa.com
Bill Morrison (Film Designer)
Bill Morrison has been called “the poet laureate of lost films” (New York Times, 9/21/2021), as he often makes films that reframe long-forgotten moving images. He has premiered feature-length films at the New York, Sundance, Telluride and Venice film festivals. He is best known for his found footage opus Decasia, 2002, and for the doc Dawson City: Frozen Time, 2016. Morrison has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Alpert Award, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He had a mid-career retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in 2014. As a projection designer, Morrison has produced films to accompany theatrical and music performance for over 30 different productions since 1990. His work in live performance has been recognized with two Obies and a Bessie Award for theatrical design.
This is his third collaboration with Beth Morrison Projects (Katrina Ballads, 2010, Soldier Songs, 2014) and his sixth appearance at BAM Next Wave (The New Yorkers, 2003, Shelter, 2005, Lightning at our feet, 2008, Persephone, 2010, and The Shooting Gallery, 2012). Recent projection design credits include John Adams’ Antony and Cleopatra, which premiered at San Francisco Opera in 2022, and was remounted at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, in 2023.