Good Works
Golden Mountain
Images of the Chinese in America - A Dance Theater Presentation
Choreographed and Directed by Yen Lu Wong
THE ENSEMBLE TED DENGLER |
PRODUCTION STAFF music: TOM NUNN and PRENT ROGERS |
Golden Mountain is not an attempt to tell a story in the sense of once this happened and then this...Rather it is a living montage created from the experience of Chinese immigration.
I. Procession
A ritual: performers and audience join to share an experience and celebrate a people. An event: the gathering of those departing for a distant land and those who have come to see them off.
II. The Journey
They came in nameless cargo ships across long waters to the gold mountain.
III. Landing and Persecution
"We will not permit the purity and sweetness of our national waters to be contaminated or polluted"...(1882 Chinese Exclusion Act).
IV. The Women at Home The Men at Work
They laid the railroad, dug the mines, irrigated the fields and orchards, sewed the garments... and then later seemed almost to disappear into the steam of hand-laundries, restaurant kitchens and the labyrinths of scientific laboratories. And the women were left behind in the villages and towns of China.
V. Return of the Man from Golden Mountain
VI. Grievances
A ceremony of purgation. "Eight hours a day good for white man, all the same good for Chinaman,"
VII. Transformation and Affirmation
We are the new flowers.
Golden Mountain is presented by the Department of Drama at the University of California, San Diego. The research for this work was supported by a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.