"Aqui Estoy" Is Here

By Broadside Style Editor Sherell Williams

The Chicago-based Albany Park Theater Project will perform for the first time at George Mason University on Tuesday, March 18 at 7:30 p.m. in the Performing Arts Building Room A105.

The performance titled “Aqui Estoy,” which means “I am here” in Spanish, is free and open to the public. The Text and Community Program at Mason is hosting the play as part of their Mason Project on Immigration.

“Aqui Estoy” chronicles the lives of undocumented immigrants living here in the United States through two different plays based off of interviews conducted by APTP youth artists in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago.

As stated in the press release, the first play, “Amor de Lejos,” details the lives of day laborers from Central America and Mexico, and the second play, “Nine Digits,” tells the story of a teen artist who has lived the life of an undocumented immigrant since his parents brought him to the U.S. from Colombia when he was six.

David Feiner, the co-founder and Artistic Director of the APTP, is part of a staff of four who directed “Aqui Estoy.”

Feiner, who was once a performer himself, describes APTP as a “multiethnic ensemble-based theater company of teenagers and young adults [who] create original multidisciplinary performances based on the real-life stories of immigrants and working class Americans.”

There are 10 ensemble members performing in “Aqui Estoy,” most of whom are from Albany Park and come from a variety of different ethnicities. Most of them have little to no performance experience and all APTP youth artists receive elaborate training year-round from professional artists.

“When people hear that it’s a play performed by teenagers, they kind of groan and think ‘Oh God, it’s gonna be either some bad preachy thing or a bad high school musical or maybe a good high school musical,’” Feiner said. “I think that’s one of the reasons why people, when they have their first experience of our theater company, that they are amazed by the sophistication of the performances by the intelligence and rigor of the ideas presented and by the passion and precision of the performances.”

The material for “Aqui Estoy” comes from six months of interviews with day laborers living and working in Chicago. The verbal histories are collected by the youth artists who receive ethnography training before they conduct their research.

“We do a fair amount of additional research and that informs the work that we do, but essentially all the stories told in ‘Aqui Estoy’ come from first hand accounts collected by members of the ensemble through interviews,” Feiner said.
The scripts are developed collectively by the ensemble, who uses music, theater and movement to present the material on stage.

“There’s a real emphasis on creating compelling and challenging and imaginative works of art that tell the stories of people whose lives may not otherwise be shared on America’s stages,” Feiner said.

Not all of the company’s productions are about immigration. Though the staff behind the play supports legislative reform for immigrants, the sole intent with “Aqui Estoy” is not political. Instead, the play is intended to shed light on the injustices faced by immigrants here in the United States, inspired in part by the current presidential election debates.

“We feel that the debate, the national conversation, that’s going on about [immigration] is so often focused on statistics and sound bytes [that people] lose sight of the fact that we’re talking about real human beings,” Feiner said. “We’re talking about fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, children and with ‘Aqui Estoy,’ we aim to tell the stories of some of those real people whose lives are affected.”

The issue is also a personal one for the APTP. In its 10 year existence, the company has had undocumented immigrants perform in its ensemble.

“All of our ensemble members live in or go to school or work in Albany Park, which is a port of entry neighborhood for new immigrants in Chicago and one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the United States,” Feiner said.

The immigrant working class neighborhood serves as inspiration for several of the company’s performances. More than half of the population in the Albany Park neighborhood was born outside of the U.S. Much of the time, when the group creates plays based on the lives of the people from the Albany Park community, the plays are created from stories told to them by immigrants.

Though the APTP often performs in their own theater and tour within Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, this performance at Mason will be their first on the east coast.

“We chose to take this production on tour outside of our own neighborhood and outside of Chicago, in particular, to try and bring it to some college campuses because our elected leaders in this country have so completely failed to pass any kind of immigration reform,” Feiner said. “It’s unacceptable. It’s a travesty that our elected officials have failed to pass immigration reform legislation. We’re motivated to try and raise our voices about that.”

For more information about the Albany Park Theater Project and their productions, visit aptpchicago.org.

A complete schedule of events for the Text and Community Program at Mason is available here.