CELESTE: A Purity Play is a community-devised performance featuring queer, non-binary, and current or former sex-working artists exploring histories of AAPI migration in the Bay Area. The performance took place on May 23, 2024, at the Northwest Berkeley site of Standard Soap Works, a 19th-century factory that relied on Chinese migrant labor.

The performance unfolded on the territory of xučyun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Ohlone people, the ancestors and descendants of the sovereign Verona Band. Standard Soap Works opened in 1876, occupying a four-story factory on a square block bounded by Addison Street, Allston Way, 2nd Street, and 3rd Street. Two years later, Berkeley incorporated as a city. The factory employed Chinese laborers, who were forced to live with their families in segregated on-site shacks. By 1886, amid rising anti-Asian sentiment and exclusionary immigration laws, all Chinese workers were fired.

The site has since undergone multiple transformations: Takara Sake USA Inc. established its operations there in 1983, and in 2021 the Palestinian Soap Cooperative—a worker-owned distributor of Nablus soap—opened in North Berkeley. All soap used in our performance was provided by the cooperative, which also received the proceeds.

CELESTE invited audiences to join a communal procession linking past and present narratives of land, immigration, exclusion, racial purity, and labor. For the symposium, we propose sharing our collective devising process alongside video documentation of the march from 4th Street and Addison to the northern end of Aquatic Park, where we offered a land acknowledgment and burned offerings for ancestors.

Created with the BAD ASIANS working group. Featuring soundscape by Xen Nhà and videography by Audrey Medrano with support from Alec Xiao.

Support for this project was provided by the East Bay Community Foundation, the Center for Cultural Power, UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender, and the Berkeley-Stanford Transpacific & Asian American Art Working Group.