Immigration is a constant. People and peoples are forever moving, either by choice or against their will. What often gets lost in its upheaval are the surprising nuances of individual stories. Lenora Lee Dance is delving deep into one such body of experiences in A Bridge to Now/Un puente hacia el presente, which will be performed Fri/28-Sun/30 at Dance Mission Theater.
Choreographer-director Lee is no stranger to exploring perspectives on immigration. Her site-specific work Within These Walls (which premiered in 2017 and produced again in 2019) was inspired by the experiences of those who were detained and processed at the Angel Island Immigration Station, located at the northern end of San Francisco Bay. By transforming and animating historic events in commemoration of the 135th anniversary of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the piece spoke to the power of individuals and communities who transcended unbelievable hardship.
In September, Lee and Peruvian co-creator Moyra Cecilia Silva Rodriguez brought A Bridge to Now to life in Lima with four dancers, and have now expanded the work with a cast from Lima, New York, and San Francisco. Its tapestry of multimedia elements includes visual projections showing people, places, and documents; voiceovers narrating personal stories; and a number of props including 400 pounds of rice. These converge to tell stories about the Chinese who immigrated, mostly from the Guangdong and Fujian provinces of China, to Peru, beginning in 1849.
Silva, a dancer and actor, studied performing arts at Lima’s Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, and worked on projects in South America as part of a collective theater group. She also sought ways to connect with a maternal great-grandfather who had immigrated from China. Having never learned any traditional dance from her family, when she was introduced to kung fu, it felt oddly familiar to her, as if her familial past was awakening within her.
After many years of experience in the field she received an Erasmus Mundus scholarship towards a master’s degree in dance and anthropology. During her research on overseas Chinese migration and dance, specifically dance in public spaces and Chinatowns, she discovered Lee, who was working on a project in Boston.
Sitting down for an interview with 48hills after a rehearsal, Lee explains how she and Silva developed the work together.
“I met Moyra during the pandemic,” she says. “She was looking for dance artists who were also working on the Chinese diaspora and contacted me.” In spite of Covid restrictions, Lee invited Silva “to be part of our 2022 show. She learned everything on Zoom, came out here and did the show with us and then we just kept talking.”
In 2023, they interviewed some of Moyra’s contacts, whose voices can now be heard in A Bridge to Now. “A lot of them are Peruvian with some Chinese ancestry,” says Lee. (About 10 percent of all Peruvians have some Chinese lineage.) “My husband’s Peruvian and my mother-in-law said, ‘I think we’re Chinese too.’ She showed me a photo and they definitely looked Chinese. A lot of people don’t want other people to know, because it excludes them from certain things.”
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Stigma persists—even after several generations, some Peruvians see having Chinese ancestry as a guarantee of permanent foreigner status.
Indeed, the Chinese diaspora has faced brutal conditions—some came to the Western hemisphere on the same ships as enslaved people from Africa. Most Chinese immigrants were men who came to work as laborers under contract. Many perished, either during the sea journey or months to years after arriving to the new country, from disease or starvation. Survivors were made to finish out their contracts working on haciendas (plantations) before becoming independent and starting their own businesses.
Lee continues, “One of the things that we noted in [the making of A Bridge to Now] was that we had the anti-miscegenation laws here [in the United States] until 1967, but many other countries didn’t have that. That’s why the Chinese were so integrated, so mixed with the Spanish, the Indigenous, the Indians, and the Italians.
“A lot of people don’t know that they actually have some Chinese roots, because they don’t have a cultural center or historical institutions that safeguard [their heritage], but some of the people that we spoke with are curators of artists who have some Chinese ancestry,” Lee says. “Tusán is the term that they use for somebody who has Chinese ancestry.
The play’s last solo features the voice of architect Angie Chang, who specializes in Chinese architecture in Lima’s Chinatown. Lee says that today people are “concerned about preserving the culture. There’s still a ton of Chinese businesses and restaurants, and sometimes you’ll see some Chinese in the restaurants, but you don’t see people on the street who are Chinese […] The younger generation want to preserve the culture, find out more about their Chinese roots.”
A BRIDGE TO NOW/UN PUENTE HACIA EL PRESENTE runs Fri/28-Sun/30. Dance Mission Theater, SF. Tickets and more info here.
