Oakland Ballet Company Artistic Director Graham Lustig’s Dancing Moons Festival showcasing Asian-American and Pacific Islander artistry, which was created in response to anti-Asian hate that arose during the pandemic, is taking on its biggest endeavor yet in 2025.
The “Angel Island Project,” a work by seven choreographers for 12 dancers inspired by Asian immigrants detained in a federal facility on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay from 1910-40, premieres at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre on May 4. It is being previewed on March 22 and March 29 in presentations on Angel Island featuring excerpts from the piece accompanied by a short lecture by Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation Executive Director Ed Tepporn.
Lustig says he got the idea for the Dancing Moons Festival at the outset of the pandemic when he learned that Oakland Ballet dancer Lawrence Chen, then a burgeoning choreographer (and now a contributor to the “Angel Island Project”) was on the receiving end of anti-Asian hate.
During rehearsals in a series of pandemic-era workshops in which Lusting was helping Chen develop his voice as a choreographer, Lustig said Chen told him, “‘You know, Graham, I don’t hang out in the park anymore, and when I need to get some food, I go to the store with my brother.’”
Lustig continues, “I found that to be so devastating to think that my dancers were being subjected to that because of the way the COVID pandemic was sometimes described as ‘kung flu.’ We’re in Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco, which are pretty progressive, but nevertheless there are still those undercurrents. … I had to look into myself and say, ‘What can I do as a director of a ballet company?’ and that’s when I got the idea to create the Dancing Moons Festival as a showcase and celebration of AAPI talent—creators such as composers, choreographers and designers.”
Lustig approached the Oakland Asian Cultural Center to collaborate, and together they inaugurated the Dancing Moons Festival in March 2022, marking the first time an American dance company staged a production with exclusively AAPI creators. The festival was well-received; Lustig and Chen each won an Isadora Duncan Award for Outstanding Achievement, and the company was invited to tour the Bay Area and nationally.
In addition to Chen, “Angel Island Project” creators are a diverse sample of the AAPI community. They include Emmy Award-winning choreographer, filmmaker, composer and educator Natasha Adorlee; choreographer Phil Chan; choreographer and former artistic director of China’s National Song and Dance Troupe Feng Ye (and founder of her eponymous South Bay troupe); former American Ballet Theatre dancer Elaine Kudo; Oakland Ballet dancer Ashley Thopiah; and San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Wei Wang.
“I wanted to have choreographers who have different perspectives, styles and backgrounds,” Lustig says.
The “Angel Island Project” suite of dances is set to an oratorio by composer Huang Ruo based on poems that detainees wrote on the facility’s walls; the piece was commissioned by the Del Sol Quartet, which debuted the work in 2021. The quartet will reprise it, accompanied by the vocal ensemble Volti, at the Paramount Theatre premiere in May.
“Angel Island Project” seeks to convey a sense of the dangers and dilemmas facing the immigrants. In Feng Ye’s suite, a small wooden boat perched on the head of a dancer symbolizes their journeys’ unknown factors, risks and impending perils. Meanwhile, another dancer’s 18-foot-long plait of hair signifies the ties that bind immigrants to their homelands.
Yet parts of “Angel Island Project” suggest hope and resilience. In the portion by Chan, the dancers undulate like waves amid a layer of dry ice, with their heads and shoulders floating like “mountains,” as Lustig says Chan described them.
Also symbolic is the jade color scheme in much of the piece, which matches the immigration station’s shade of paint. (In one of the poems on the walls, the facility is described as the “jade prison.”)
The upcoming hour-long previews on the island—presented in collaboration with the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation and Angel Island Parks and Recreation—will offer a palpable sense of the “jade prison” both inside the facility, and outdoors, near the pier where detainees disembarked.
“I didn’t want this to be solely a theatrical experience,” Lustig says. “The experience on the island is perhaps more real—you’re there, it’s all around you, it’s unavoidable.”
Oakland Ballet Company’s “An Introduction to the Angel Island Project” is at 12:45 p.m. March 22 and March 29 at the Angel Island Immigration Station. The “Angel Island Project” is at 3 p.m. May 4 at the Paramount Theatre, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. For Angel Island tickets ($67-S75; ferry passage must be purchased separately) and Paramount tickets ($43-$86), visit oaklandballet.org.
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