SPoRA: Retelling stories of immigration and war

There are mil­lions of nar­ra­tives about “the jour­ney”. Tales of war and chaos, of love and long­ing, of fear and hate. Tales of myr­iad forces that uproot so many of us from our home­lands and blow us far across the world to set­tle in for­eign shores. Tales that speak of our human race’s over­pow­er­ing will to survive.

Dancer, musi­cian and vocal­ist Dohee Lee, incor­po­rated some of these nar­ra­tives in her mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary per­for­mance piece – Puri 5: SPoRA, that pre­miered at the Oak­land Asian Cul­tural Cen­ter last Sat­ur­day as part of the center’s fall fundrais­ing extrav­a­ganza. Based on Lee and her co-artists’ (Hiroyuki Jimi Nak­a­gawa, Van-Anh Vanessa Vo and Adria Otte’s) per­sonal expe­ri­ences as Korean, Viet­namese and Japan­ese first-generation immi­grants, the 90-minute long per­for­mance explored shared sto­ries of immi­gra­tion, war his­to­ries and the Asian dias­pora through a com­pelling mix of music, song, dance and the spo­ken word.

Puri is a Korean word that refers to the releas­ing of sup­pressed feel­ings and emo­tions. Lee’s pre­vi­ous cycles of Puri (1 to 4) focused on the Korean War, sex­ual slav­ery and Korean mythology.

In Puri 5, the open­ing set turned the audi­to­rium into an air­port ter­mi­nal with per­form­ers nav­i­gat­ing their way around the audi­ence tables, drag­ging suit­cases behind them, check­ing flight tim­ings and call­ing out to each other. This segued neatly into an intrigu­ing acapella solo by Lee that used the dan­de­lion seed (spora) as a jour­ney metaphor and spoke of dreams and pass­ports and Asian women wait­ing in line in Hawaii clutch­ing pho­tographs of strangers who would soon be their husbands.

The rest of the per­for­mance com­prised a mix of drum­ming duets, dance and vio­lin solos, ensem­ble col­lages on tra­di­tional instru­ments, like the Viet­namese dan tranh zither, dan t’rung or bam­boo xylo­phone (Vanessa Vo) and Japan­ese taiko drums (Nak­a­gawa) and a delight­fully chore­o­graphed piece by Lee and Jamae­sori jamae​sori​.word​press​.com, a Korean women’s col­lec­tive that uses tra­di­tional Korean drum­ming to sup­port social jus­tice movements.

Though intended immi­gra­tion nar­ra­tive didn’t quite hold through the entire per­for­mance, it didn’t really mat­ter. In the end, the music, espe­cially the drums, ruled.