Angel Island and Alcatraz: Site-inspired Dance, Theater, and Landscapes of Incarceration

Location: Osher Theater, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)

Lenora Lee, Artistic Director, Lenora Lee Dance

Ava Roy, Artistic Director, We Players

Co-sponsored by UC Berkeley Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies

Choreographer Lenora Lee and theater director Ava Roy will discuss San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island and Alcatraz Island as creative catalysts and settings for their site-inspired performances addressing migration, incarceration, and resistance. 

Lee’s dance performance Within These Walls was inspired by the experiences of people incarcerated at the Angel Island Immigration Station and premiered inside the detention barracks there on the 135th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act. It will be performed by UC Berkeley students at Zellerbach Playhouse in February 2023, in a restaging directed by Sansan Kwan. 

Lee’s latest research-based dance work, In the Movement (at ODC Sept. 1-11), focuses on family separations and the mass detention of immigrants. It was conceived to be performed at Alcatraz, and incorporates footage shot in the island prison.

Roy used the entirety of Angel Island as a stage for a peripatetic production of Homer’s Odyssey that led the audience on a journey over hills, beaches and ruins, exploring notions of exile, home, and the wages of war. On Alcatraz, she examined notions of human freedom, justice and redemption in a three-year residency with the National Park Service on Alcatraz.

In addition to directing a production of Hamlet on Alcatraz, Roy collaborated with youth at the San Francisco Juvenile Justice Center and artists incarcerated at San Quentin. She brought together artists and the public in a 4-day Alcatraz Symposium on Freedom and Justice that included performance art, music, dance, visual art exhibitions, ritual, and panel discussions with formerly incarcerated artists as well as victim awareness activists.

Associated performance:

Within These Walls, created by Lenora Lee, directed by Sansan Kwan, and performed by students in the Berkeley Dance Project: Zellerbach Playhouse, February 23-26, 2023.

This talk is  part of a year-long program of performances, exhibitions, and talks that use Angel Island as an observatory from which to view landscapes of migration, incarceration and resistance.  A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and Berkeley Arts and Design.

Sign up to hear about future lectures, performances and exhibitions in A Year on Angel Island here.

Lenora Lee, Artistic Director of Lenora Lee Dance (LLD), is a dancer, choreographer, and artistic director who presents large-scale multimedia performance works integrating dance, music, video projection, and text that connect various styles of movement and music to culture, history, and human rights issues. She has been an Artist Fellow at the de Young Museum, a Djerassi Resident Artist, and a Visiting Scholar at New York University through the Asian/Pacific/American Institute, and an Artist in Residence at Dance Mission Theater. 

Ava Roy is the Founding Artistic Director of We Players and is dedicated to transforming public spaces into realms of immersive theater. She has pioneered unique partnerships with both the National Park Service and the California State Park system, creating large-scale performances at park sites throughout the Bay Area. Her work is deeply inspired by the entrenched histories, communities and energies of each site, as well as the natural environment. Roy earned her BA at Stanford University. In addition to her performance work, Roy is a yoga teacher and sailor.

Free and in-person; see COVID safety protocols here.

The event will also be live-streamed via Zoom webinar. To attend online, register for the webinar here.

Video of this talk will be posted about one week after the event.