REVIEW OF THE ART OF BELONGING

The Art of Belonging at the Rizal Center By Ginger Leopoldo

In recent weeks, the Rizal Center has become a home for The Art of Belonging, a multidisciplinary theater experience blending literature, archival film, and live performance into a communal act of remembering and imagining. The production offered more than a show. It created a space to ask: Where do we belong, and how do we carry our stories forward?

Origins of the Production

The Art of Belonging grew from a long commitment to activating Filipino American history at the Rizal Center and across Chicago. As Circa Pintig marks its 35th anniversary season, we returned to the roots of our storytelling practice: immigration, displacement, labor, and the everyday search for home.

Two pillars guided our work:

• The literature of Bienvenido Santos, especially stories from The Scent of Apples, The Day the Dancers Came, and Immigration Blues. His writing gives language to loneliness, humor, and quiet resilience among Filipino immigrants in the United States; these short stories were first adapted by Larry Leopoldo in 2005.
• The 16mm home movies of Nick Viernes, an amateur filmmaker whose rare footage captures everyday Filipino American life in Chicago across decades: parades, family gatherings, and community events that might have vanished.

These materials reached us through the tireless work of Estrella Alamar and the Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago. Their archives and oral histories remind us that community memory is fragile and must be preserved.

An Illinois Humanities Activating History Microgrant helped lift these stories off the page and screen and into the bodies and voices of our community at the Rizal Center. The production also connects to the upcoming Garet: Pinoys in Chicago by Dr. Rey E. de la Cruz, a project currently being workshopped with our older adults at the Rizal Center.

Partnership and Community Grounding

This project is rooted in partnership and bayanihan:

• CIRCA Pintig led the adaptation and performance with an intergenerational ensemble, including artists who first performed related material in the 1990s and have now returned to these stories as older adults.
• The Rizal Center offered more than a venue. It provided a living context, a home away from home for Filipino and Filipino American communities, now in a period of renewal that includes kitchen renovation, mural work, and new programs for youth and elders.
• The Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago shared archival materials, stories, and institutional memory, affirming that theater can act as a living extension of the archive where documents, films, and memories become vivid in front of a live audience.

Together with Illinois Humanities and in connection with Garet: Pinoys in Chicago, these partners placed The Art of Belonging at the crossroads of history, performance, and community organizing.

Stories on Stage

At the heart of the production are adapted scenes from Bienvenido Santos alongside oral histories and commentary that situate his work within the Filipino American experience.

Audiences encountered:

• A Filipino writer navigating wartime displacement and the ache of distance from home.
• Intimate portraits of couples facing illness, loneliness, and changing gender expectations in the diaspora. These stories unfold quietly in kitchens and living rooms as much as in historic moments.
• Reflections on how Filipino women and families have been seen and unseen over time, and how love, caregiving, and sacrifice shape immigrant life.

These are not grand epics. They are small, precise windows into the compromises, joys, and heartbreaks that define migration. In performance, they invited audiences to sit close to the characters’ inner lives and to recognize echoes of their own families.

Seeing Ourselves in the Archive

Digitized 16mm films by Nick Viernes threaded through the live scenes as moving backdrops and interludes.

On the surface, these home movies are simple: picnics, parades, church events, neighborhood gatherings. In context, they carry weight:

• They offer rare glimpses of Filipino American life in mid 20th century Chicago. Many of these moments were almost lost until community members stepped in to preserve them.
• They let today’s audiences see themselves in continuity with earlier generations, standing in similar rooms, laughing in similar ways, working through familiar questions of labor, home, and belonging.

Santos’ literary imagination layered with Viernes’ moving images created a sensation of time folding in on itself. The past and present felt in conversation in the air of the Rizal Center.

An Immersive Rizal Center Experience

The Art of Belonging was not a distanced proscenium show. It was an immersive, in the round experience grounded in the hospitality of the Rizal Center.

Key elements included:

• Flexible seating and close audience proximity that felt like being in someone’s sala rather than watching from afar.
• Food and drink as part of the event, including popcorn, ginger tea, arroz caldo (lugaw), pancit, and post show sharing, echoing gatherings where theater, food, and conversation intermingle.
• A new mural and visual art throughout the building, turning the space into an exhibit of Filipino and Southeast Asian imagination.

Audience members were invited into the work through interactive prompts. They wrote on index cards about what belonging means to them, scanned QR codes for surveys, and left responses that will inform future programming and strengthen our case for support.

Talkbacks: Belonging as a Shared Question

Talkback sessions may have been the most powerful part of the experience. After each performance, the audience, cast, and creative team gathered to speak openly.

We heard:

• First generation immigrants recall arrivals, long separations from family, and the bureaucratic hurdles that shaped Filipino migration.
• Second generation community members describe how rarely they have seen Filipino stories centered on stage and how it felt to be reflected so directly.
• Reflections on universal themes like caregiving, aging, illness, love, and loneliness, and how the production connected private experiences to a larger history.

For many, the talkbacks affirmed that belonging is not a fixed status but an ongoing practice. In speaking and listening together, the community created new layers of meaning that went beyond the script.

Looking Ahead

The Art of Belonging is one chapter in a larger season at the Rizal Center and beyond:

• A 24 Hour Play Festival will invite playwrights and directors to create short new pieces overnight, some continuing to explore migration, intergenerational memory, and cultural identity.
• An adaptation of King Lear through a Filipino immigrant family will further examine legacy, care, and fracture across generations.
• Parallel efforts in archiving and community organizing, from cataloging books and preserving films to training volunteers, aim to build a living archive where stories can continue to surface and be shared.
• In October 2026, Garet: Pinoys in Chicago will expand this work into a broader platform for Filipino American  community storytelling in new ways.

As we close this initial run, one audience message keeps echoing: “I saw my family in this.” That recognition of our elders, our younger selves, our absent relatives, and our possible futures is the true art of belonging.

The production may end each night with bows and applause, but the conversation it sparks in kitchens, group chats, classrooms, and board meetings is only beginning.

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REVIEW OF THE ART OF BELONGING by:

Kin Ribeiro is a writer and community organizer based in the Northwest Side of Chicago. Their publications include the short story “either/or” in the 2023 edition of the The Allegheny Review and their chapbook, “Pachakuti” is forthcoming with INCA Press. For inquiries you can reach Kin at kinpearlymussel@proton.me.

The Art of Belonging~ a remedy for the dis-ease of exile

I watched Circa Pintig’s production of The Art of Belonging and it expressed something I feel strongly but am often too embarrassed to put words to. It is the overwhelming, decadent desire to belong. I say it is decadent because the things we do for this desire often feel like too much, like traveling 30 miles to see someone from your homeland speak, or inviting underage dancers you have no relation to to your apartment for a meal, or asking a man three times your age you just met to marry you. However something about this desire makes one say, “I just can’t help myself”. Throughout the play the desire to belong is accompanied by disease, shame and thoughts of death. However within each play are moments that push back against the pathologization of the desire to belong, and instead present it as a creative act, the art of belonging, that the characters practice with each other.

The production took place at Rizal Center, which has been in the community for over fifty years. “Upon entering the venue, it almost felt like a family reunion, given that I recognized people I had marched, studied, and engaged with in other Filipino cultural spaces in Chicago.” People seemed to recognize each other too; there was a general hum of familiarity and warmth. The set included a screen on the stage where archival footage was later played. On the ground, at the same level as the audience, was a kitchen table, a cabinet, and a large trunk, sketching the contours of an immigrant household. It is a set that travelled through time and space, shrunk and expanded, to accommodate the unique settings of each of the plays. To draw the audience’s focus towards the actors a spotlight shone into the middle of the set. Many of the scenes incorporated audio clips to orient the viewer, whether it was the sound of birdsong to signal a physical rural setting or the sound of crashing waves to evoke the affective time and place of nostalgia.

The Art of Belonging is composed of three short plays interspersed with archival footage from cultural historian Estrella Alamar’s collection. Each of the plays is adapted from one of Bienvenido Santos’ works. The first play “The Scent of Apples” depicts Santos, a writer and lecturer, visiting a Filipino American farmer, Fabia, and his wife, Ruth, at their home in rural Michigan. In the second play, “The Day the Dancers Came”, Fil, a young Filipino man living in Chicago, eagerly awaits the arrival of the Bayanihan Dancers while his roommate, Tony, suffers from an extreme skin condition. In “Immigration Blues” Antonietta accompanies her sister, Monica, in visiting Alipio, an older Filipino man, at his house, in the hopes of helping Antonietta attain citizenship.

A common thread through each of the plays is the presence of disease that haunts the Filipino American characters. The prefix “dis” in disease makes me think of dis-comfort, dis-association, dis-identification, all of which are present in the plays. In the first vignette Ruth mentions Fabia having appendicitis, which is fitting in that it is when something inside you, native to you, bursts and suddenly becomes toxic. This represents how Fabia’s longing for his homeland and his people is so encompassing, it threatens to destroy his ability to act appropriately. Fabia asks “What is the difference between our women and the American women?” to the disgruntlement of the audience, “a college crowd and mostly women”. His nostalgia for the Philippines manifests itself in his feelings about women to the extent that it threatens to damage his marriage. Fabia has hung a picture of an unknown Filipina on his wall. Santos asks, “Doesn’t your wife say anything about it?” to which Fabia answers, “It bothered her at first, but now she’s grown accustomed to it.” Santos also seems self conscious about his longing for his people as he confesses to the audience at his lecture, “As for my own people, they seemed so far away during these terrible times that I must speak of them with a little too much fervor.” In the first play, Fabia and Santos’ longing for their homeland and people feel like too much against the background of the university and white, rural Michigan.

Disease manifests itself in “The Day the Dancers Came” through Tony’s skin condition, which is somewhat like tinia flava, a common disease in the Philippines, but has become exacerbated and covers his entire body. Skin conditions are interesting in that a place’s climate, humidity, and temperature have a strong impact on skin health. Ailing skin is a constant reminder of Tony’s distance from his homeland. Additionally, the skin condition’s illegibility to doctors in the U.S. suggest that this dis-ease, this acute awareness of one’s unbelonging, is not shared by white Americans. Tony also constantly wonders if the disease is cancer, his own cells mutating his cells, as if there is something inherently wrong with him. The disease has left Tony bedridden, preventing him from fully participating in society despite his youth. This sense of shame and isolation is doubled when Phil tells Tony that the Bayanihan Dancers “had been briefed too well:… beware of the Pinoys… keep away from them,” and describes the way the dancers had looked at him, “I was unclean. Basura. Garbage. They were ashamed of me. How could I be Filipino?” The dis-identification that Phil experiences when trying to engage with the dancers is described through the language of disease and contagion, linking his experiences to Tony’s experiences of disease. While Tony’s disease handicaps him from integrating into American society, Phil experiences the affective dis-ease of shame when trying to reconnect with Filipinos. Even as Tony navigates the potential of becoming physically undone on a cellular level, with the question “How could I be Filipino?”, Phil’s sense of identity threatens to unravel.

In addition to these more specific ailments, loss of mobility appears throughout the play. In a story retold in “The Scent of Apples”, Fabia and Ruth struggle to move, he due to appendicitis and she due to pregnancy, and both due to the lack of a car to take them to the hospital. In “The Day the Dancers Came” Fil reminisces about a time when he too “was nimble on my feet and graceful with my hands” like the dancers. Alipio’s face is often contorted in pain as he attempts to move after being injured in a car accident in “Immigration Blues”. The loss of mobility that these characters experience points to a shared, mostly unsaid loss of mobility that is inherent to the immigrant experience, including poverty through unjust labor and property ownership policies and entrapment in a crippled immigration system. Throughout the text disease becomes dis-ease as physical maladies point to an affective sense of unbelonging.

Along with dis-ease, death seems to haunt the characters. Even as Fabia and Santos drive through the glorious American countryside, Fabia mentions the death of the plant life around him. “The trees are getting ready to die, and they show their colors, proud like.” When reminiscing about his home in the Philippines there is only another death, “Leafy plants grew on the sides, buds pointing downwards, but that wilted and died before they could become flowers.” The subtle descriptions of setting reflect how Fabia, an immigrant caught between worlds, sees death both in the isolation of rural Michigan and the amnesia of his hometown in the Philippines where, “nobody would remember me now.” In “The Day the Dancers Came”, Tony says “One day I’m just gonna die,” and his roommate agrees “All of us will die. One day.” Alone in his apartment, Alipio mourns the death of his wife, “Seniang was my good luck. When God decided to take her, I had nothing but bad luck.”  Death seems ever encroaching, whether its through a bomb descending in Chicago or the Philippines or the slow death of the experience of displacement. Life itself feels like an exile to the isolated Filipino American characters and death is a quiet companion to even the most quotidian conversations.

The logic of the play insists that solitude feels desperate and like a slow death because it is. Without each other, the characters are only waiting for dis-ease to overtake them. In the last act as Monica is leaving, saying, “We couldn’t do this to you. We were wrong… We should’ve been more honest. But I was ashamed,” Alipio shouts from the doorway, “What is there to forgive? There’s nothing to forgive. Don’t go,” and it seems to mean that wanting citizenship, a form of belonging, is nothing to be ashamed of. With the desire to belong one cannot help themself because it is impossible to achieve belonging alone. Belonging is inherently something you do together. Amongst the dis-ease and immobility there are small acts of mercy. Santos traveling to Fabia’s remote home and Fabia’s family’s warm welcome. Fil’s tender care for his ailing friend, and Tony’s empathy with Fil’s desperate wish for the Bayanihan Dancers to visit. The gentle assistance that Monica provides to Alipio and Alipio’s offer of dinner, but first merienda. All that love, love that feels like too much sometimes, conveys the message, “through you I belong.” Although this type of love can be seen as less legitimate, as performative and opportunistic, there is something poignant about it. “Through you I belong” captures a connection that surpasses age, time, or conventional standards of beauty; it explains the affection and generosity the characters feel for the complete strangers they recognize themselves in. Interestingly, the interactions depicted in the play are artless in a sense- not on the part of the actors, but of the characters. The characters often miss the mark and talk past each other; there are silences and inappropriate reactions. But the art of belonging isn’t about being smooth. The play insists that to use all our wits, all our resources, for each other, is the most creative act.

After the play there was a talk back session with the cast and creative team. I asked the actors, “How does it feel to embody those that came before you?” It was a rather naive question; although the play spans from the 1940s to the 1970s it would be remiss to place it in the past as the stories are still very present in the lives of the performers and audience today. We are all still navigating here and there and learning the art of belonging. The intergenerational collection of people gathered that day, with different temporal proximities to the experience of immigration, seemed to find a sense of recognition and hope in each other. As one actor, Arvin Jalandoon shared, his hope is in the “precocious, socially aware” young people. “I’m a marginal person. I don’t know where I am but they seem to know where they are and I anchor myself in them. We’re in a good place despite everything… If you are young and Filipino you have an interesting future and you have the power to change it.”