The impossible room I

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

„The Impossible Room“ is a performance project inspired by a photo of my friend, showing him and his wife on one side and his parents on the other side of a worn black line. The location is Haskell Free Library and Opera House, in Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont. The Haskell family purposefully built the building along the border in 1904 to promote cross-border interaction and friendship. The thick black line runs beneath the opera house seats and diagonally across the center of the library’s reading room to mark the Canada–US border. This venue has become a meeting point for people who can’t cross borders due to multiple reasons.

Borders are not static places. They change with the mood on one or both sides of the line. It has been more challenging for Iranian families to get a US visa because of Iran-US political relationships over the past 40 years, which the travel ban has worsened. This has affected the visa regulation for students and their parents who wish to visit their children while studying in the US. The Iranian students are often granted a single entry visa, meaning every time they leave the US, they have to re-apply for a return visa which may or may not be granted. Therefore, they seek other ways to see each other, even if it is only for a short period and under surveillance. The Haskell Library may be the only place where the family members get to see each other in person if neither is permitted entry into Canada and the US, respectively.

„The Impossible Room“ explores how contemporary dance might embody ideas of separation, border-crossing, intersection, and enforcement, and how bodies „mark“ their space as citizens or non-citizens. In this age of geopolitical tension and talk of walls, this performance reminds us that borders are fictions created by humans as real and menacing as we choose to make them.