OPERA

Huang Ruo: Angel Island

THURSDAY – SATURDAY, JANUARY 11 – 13, 2024
7:30 PM

PROTOTYPE Festival
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn

$37.50-$49.50
TICKETS + INFORMATION

What’s really great about Huang Ruo isn’t just that he seamlessly blends Chinese and Western elements in his music, or that he inflects his classical pieces with pop and vernacular: a bunch of people do that. What’s really great about Huang Ruo is his innate mastery of structure: to paraphrase something the foundational rock critic Paul Williams said about some rock group or other in the 1960s, if you stranded Ruo in space, he’d take the surrounding imponderable ether of the universe and construct from it a spaceship to fly right back after you. This piece sets poetry written by Chinese immigrants on the wall of Angel Island, the San Francisco Bay immigration center through which they passed to face almost unimaginable discrimination. Films of those walls in the remains of that center by no less than Bill Morrison are part of the production.

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT: If only it were possible to get into April Bloomfield and Gabe Stulman’s Sailor, this would be a good time to do so.