Site-inspired Dance, Theater, and Landscapes of Incarceration | Lenora Lee and Ava Roy (Lecture, 84 minutes)
Abstract
Angel Island and Alcatraz: Site-inspired Dance, Theater, and Landscapes of Incarceration | Lenora Lee and Ava Roy (Fall 2022 Speaker Series)
Lecture, 84 minutes; Part of the Fall 2022 Speaker Series (Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration and Resistance
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Friday, September 9, 2022 Recording of presentation at @BAMPFA Osher Theater; free and open to the public
Speakers:
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
Description: 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.
UC Berkeley Arts + Design Fridays: Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration, and Resistance is a lively series of talks by artists, performers, scholars, and activists exploring themes of global and US migration, exclusion, and belonging. It is also a UC Berkeley course offered as Humanities 20: Explorations of Art + Design. Organized by Susan Moffat, Creative Director of Future Histories Lab and Executive Director of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative and by Lisa Wymore, Professor of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies and Faculty Advisor of Berkeley Arts + Design. Hosted by Susan Moffat.
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This speaker series is part of a program of music and dance performances, exhibitions, public conversations, and courses called A Year on Angel Island (futurehistories.berkeley.edu/angel-island/), using the historic Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay as a jumping-off point to consider landscapes from China to Australia to Mexico as sites of memory and meaning.
A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and the Arts + Design Initiative. UC Berkeley departmental cosponsors include the Departments of Music; Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; Ethnic Studies; History; and American Studies. Campus partners include the Arts Research Center, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, On the Same Page, Othering and Belonging Institute, Center for Race & Gender, Worth Ryder Gallery, and BAMPFA. Our community partner is the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.