(Un)Documents
by The Vortex
Sep. 23, 2017
Saturday
"somewhere in an archive, i am burning soft and young
i am pages of testimonies, receipts, report cards
case numbers making up the limbs i lack on the page
and somewhere else my brothers, their papers
deportation proceedings, testimonies, receipts, criminal
records scratched and bound and gone and
case numbers making up the limbs they lost leaving
and why"
Comprised of poems, journal entries, and immigration paperwork, (Un)Documents is a struggle to tell and an attempt to figure out what's worth telling. This workshop is an attempt to ask questions about how we talk about citizenship, documentation, its absence, and what, if anything, comes from telling. Mostly, it's a story about me and my brothers and some papers.
With a single phrase, you can give up your country. With a single signature, you can tear a family apart. With a single word, you can learn to transform. In his first full-length solo show, (Un)Documents, award-winning actor and poet Jesus I. Valles journeys across both sides of a river with two names, moving between languages to find his place as a son, a lover, a teacher, and a brother in a nation that demands sacrifice at the altar of citizenship. In doing so, he creates 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
by Jesus I. Valles
The Vortex
September 23, 2017
3 - 5 p.m. at the Vortex, September 23, 2017
