I recently sat down with Wei Wang, principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet, to talk about a new work he’s choreographing with the Oakland Ballet Company. The piece is called Angel Island, and I caught him in a narrow window of time, less than two hours before curtain, at the tail end of the season, with his parents in town. Not exactly a quiet moment.
And still, he was very much inside this new work.
Angel Island is structured in chapters, with several choreographers each taking on a different part of the story. It has a cumulative feel, each section adding another perspective rather than trying to tell everything at once. Wei’s contribution focuses on one woman detained on Angel Island Immigration Station for close to two years. That detail alone shifts the scale of the piece. Most detainees were held for weeks. Some longer. But nearly two years introduces something else entirely.
It also reframes the comparison people tend to reach for. This is not Alcatraz Island. There is no crime anchoring the narrative. Only a system that held people in place, often for reasons that now read as arbitrary, if not outright cruel.
Part of what gives the work its depth is where it draws from. Poetry carved directly into the barracks walls, left behind by those who were held there. It’s not an abstract source. It’s physical, immediate, and difficult to distance yourself from once you’ve seen it.
Wei doesn’t dramatize it, which is part of what makes it land. He talks about it plainly, almost to the point of understatement. It’s “depressing, sad… even scary to think that was happening,” he says, before adding, more quietly, that it also “reminds me how we got here.”
He doesn’t describe it as distant history. If anything, it feels uncomfortably close to him. There’s a sense of inheritance in the way he talks about it, a mix of awareness and obligation. He mentions feeling lucky, but also responsible, as if the work itself is part of paying that forward.
That carries into how he’s structured his section. Instead of trying to take on the scale of the history, he narrows it. One woman, one case, one set of circumstances that still resist easy explanation. “These people were not criminals,” he says, almost as a correction, or maybe just a reminder.
From there, the choreography shifts away from narrative and into something more internal. He talks about building a sense of environment rather than a sequence of events, something closer to pressure than plot. The dancers have to feel it. The confinement. The claustrophobia. The sense of being held in place inside something that was never meant to be lived in.
It’s also where his role changes in a way that isn’t entirely straightforward. For years, he has been inside other people’s work, refining it, carrying it, giving it shape onstage. Here, he’s responsible for building the structure itself, working with younger dancers, asking them to arrive at something that can’t simply be demonstrated or corrected into place.
Technique is still there. It has to be. But it’s no longer the point. What matters more is responsiveness, the ability to register what’s happening in real time and let that shift the performance from within.
Even then, he keeps a distance from the material. He doesn’t try to collapse himself into it or resolve it for the audience. His focus stays on telling the story clearly and letting people sit with it on their own terms.
The piece itself moves through a dark emotional register. Confinement, uncertainty, a sense of time stretched thin. It doesn’t try to smooth that over. If anything, it stays there longer than is comfortable. But it doesn’t end entirely in that space either. There’s a shift, not quite resolution, but something closer to perspective.
As he puts it, the goal is for people to see what they have now, and not lose sight of what it took to get there.
There are only two performances at the Herbst Theatre, and part of the intrigue is how something this internal translates physically. How memory becomes staging. How absence takes shape.
Companies like the Oakland Ballet Company tend to have the space to take on work like this. Smaller in scale, but often sharper in intent. When it lands, it lingers.
This feels like the kind of piece that might. May 8-9, 2026. Tickets here.
Featured image credit: John Hefti
