Jesús I. Valles’ ‘(Un)Documents’ Opens Tonight

Teatro Audaz continues its 2020/21 Live-streamed season with the award-winning production of (Un)Documents, written and performed by Jesús I. Valles and directed by Rudy Ramirez.

In (Un)Documents, Valles journeys across both sides of a river with two names, moving between languages to find their place as a child, a lover, a teacher, and a sibling in a nation that demands sacrifice at the altar of citizenship. In doing so, they create a new kind of documentation written with anger, fierce love, and the knowledge that what makes us human can never be captured on a government questionnaire.

(Un)Documents is a multiple B. Iden Payne Award winner for Outstanding Actor in a Drama (Valles), Outstanding Director of a Drama (Ramirez), and Outstanding Original Script. It is also an Austin Critics Table Award recipient for Excellence in Direction (Ramirez) and it was named one of Robert Faires’s Top10 Theatrical Treasures of 2018 in the Austin Chronicle.

When asked by ArtScene SA what they hope audiences will take away from the show, Valles said, “I always hope that the show will leave audiences with the hunger to find new language to talk about citizenship and migrations. I would love for audiences to imagine a world where we care for one another far more than we care for the nation-states that so often hurt us or exploit our labor and our bodies. I want us to choose to love each other better and far more than we love our countries.

“A country, a law, a border — all of these things are fictions that cannot love us back. What might it mean to choose each other every day instead? For those audience members directly impacted by immigration policy, my hope is that the performance will help to ease some of the loneliness and silence that so often becomes part of our contract with this nation. I hope, more than anything, that the performance encourages us to make a home, a new country, in and with one another.”

Ramirez said, “Jesús and I have been collaborating on this show since 2018; we particularly worked together on developing a vocabulary of movement to match Jesús’s incredible poetry.”

(Un)Documwents live-streams from the Public Theater of San Antonio tonight, tomorrow and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. Tickets are available here.