"All of Me": Performance, Skits and Readings by Ignacio Rivera

Ignacio Rivera’s performance was a series of short poems and skits. He portrayed many characters that he had experienced during his life, and highlighted a few that he wrote about based on the time he spent in Hawaii as an entertainer and sex worker.
Rivera, a “Queer-Trans-Entity, and Black Boricua performance artist,” is also an activist and the founder of a non profit dedicated to spreading economic justice as a form of gender and sexual liberation.

The main drive of the poetry was to challenge preconceptions about gender and sexuality. As a member of the trans-community and an activist, Ignacio used he/she pronouns interchangeably, often substituting in they or “ze” so that there would be no gender identification. The skits were meant to be portrayals of certain people in his life, whose names he had changed. He acted as Nena-Chucho (a trans woman), her mother, and her good friend.

Ignacio’s acting was superb. He was able to switch fluidly from character to character, often changing just a garment. He began with a “guyish” button down shirt as his main attire for the evening, but then switched into a dress when playing the mother figure, and into a pink hooded sweatshirt. He also played the ‘trans character’, by changing into high heels. By being able to switch clothes and convincingly act as characters of different genders and sexualities, he really forced questioning of what gender really means, and of what sexuality really means. In that sense, the performance was extremely effective, since the audience had to question how one person could convincingly play so many different parts, almost to the extent of morphing into each one of them. Even by changing clothes, he convincingly looked more feminine or more masculine, challenging our concepts of what that really means.

The poetry, I felt, was intended to capture the idea of humanity and love. Many of his poems were very explicit, but also communicated deep feelings of love and longing, that were very natural. He spoke of a story where he was in the bathroom with another girl and they were exploring sex and sexuality, and at one point, the girl got up and urinated standing up. Ignacio was so amazed that he decided to try himself, and was found by his mother and spanked very hard, and told “Girls Sit.” He finished the poem and told us, “See, even then, how powerful it is to be told what a specific gender is expected to do.”

In another one of his poems, he spoke about how he had a roommate who was a beautiful woman, and she talked about how she wanted to build her house a certain way, and they would lie together and build castles in the sky, and he would lie next to her and love her in his mind. While the image of that would be confusing to a lot of people, since it is hard to conceptualize what gender Ignacio is, and many people have preconceived notions of what gender really means, I was struck by how natural and communicative the poem was, and how the protagonist could be genderless and it wouldn’t matter—the sentiment it communicated was still based in love and longing. I felt the performance effectively challenged notions of what gender means, through visuals as well as through the written and performed word.