Felon: An American Washi Tale
Presented by Illinois Humanities and the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago
When
Mar 15, 2024
7:00pm–10:00pm
Cost
$15 General Admission
$5 Students, seniors, and children
7 p.m. Performance | 8 p.m. Post-show Conversation HOSTED BY damon williams and Daniel Kisslinger of AirGo | 8:30 p.m. Book Signing and Reception
Tickets on sale NOW
Felon: An America Washi Tale is a solo performance by Reginald Dwayne Betts that explores the experiences, memories, and consequences of incarceration through poetry, storytelling, and the art of Japanese paper-making.
Performed by poet, lawyer, and MacArthur Fellow Reginald Dwayne Betts, this Washi Tale moves literally and metaphorically beyond the artist’s own life, unwrapping the disturbing ways that prison touches us all.
In Betts' words, Felon is about reimagining paper. The pages of a book being slid into a cell, stoves made of toilet paper, kites from a father, handwritten affidavits, legal complaints, certificates of pardon: the variety of papers that reveals what is possible and burdened by prison. The world of Felon is shaped by set design by Japanese paper artist Kyoko Ibe, crafted from "prison paper" that artist Ruth Lingen constructed from the clothes of men Betts first met in prison as a teenager, each of whom were still in prison during the earliest stages of this project.
Directed and developed by Elise Thoron, this story of violence, love, and fatherhood challenges us to peer out from the shadow of mass incarceration and imagine what else is possible.
This performance lasts 60 minutes. Tickets include a post-performance conversation with Betts hosted by AirGo, and a book signing and reception.
Written and performed by Reginald Dwayne Betts
Directed and Developed by Elise Thoron
Set Design by Kyoko Ibe
Light Design by Jane Cox
Sound Design by Palmer Hefferan
Stage Manager: Tyler Sperrazza
Felon: An American Washi Tale is co-presented by Illinois Humanities and the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.
Tickets
$15 General Admission
$5 Students, seniors (65+), and children ages 12 and under
If the ticket price poses a challenge for you, please don't hesitate to reach out to us confidentially at nationalconvening@ilhumanities.org. Our goal is to create an inclusive and welcoming environment for all participants, and your presence is important to us.
What to expect
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Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, he is the Executive Director of Freedom Reads, a not-for-profit organization that is radically transforming the access to literature in prisons through the installation of Freedom Libraries in prisons across this country.
For more than twenty-years, he has used his poetry and essays to explore the world of prison and the effects of violence and incarceration on American society. The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest collection of poetry, the American Book Award winning Felon, into a solo theater show that explores the post incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record through poetry, stories, and engaging with the timeless and transcendental art of paper-making.
In 2019, Betts won the National Magazine Award in the Essays and Criticism category for his NY Times Magazine essay that chronicles his journey from prison to becoming a licensed attorney. He has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and most recently a Civil Society Fellow at Aspen. Betts holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.
Photo by Mamadi Doumbouya
AirGo is a weekly podcast based in Chicago that reshapes the culture of the city and beyond for the more liberatory and creative. Through longform conversations with movement workers, artists, rappers, poets, musicians, organizers, and changemakers, AirGo puts Chicago's reimaginers in conversation and creates a living dialogue-based archive of our creative communities and social movements. AirGo is the flagship show of Respair Production & Media, an ecosystem hub creating and supporting the media needed to reshape culture toward liberation. and is a sponsored project of Allied Media Projects.
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