Trespassing Boundaries is a collaborative performance using Internet2 technology. Trespassing Boundaries was performed for the first time in New York and in Tel Aviv on November 10, 2005. Initiated as a creative experiment and institutional collaboration between New York University (Barbara Rose Haum) and the University of Tel Aviv (Sharon Aronson-Lehavi).

Trespassing Boundaries emerges from the Biblical text read during the week of November 10, 2005 (Kristallnacht). It weaves together narratives of the Tower of Babel and the conflict between Sarah and Hagar with contemporary language stemming from newspaper clippings such as the New York Times, as well as popular Israeli and Arabic newspapers.

Two Settings as One: An In-Between Space for Performance

Watch Video

Our task was to merge New York City and Tel Aviv. On a set that resembles a fictional archeological site, the performance deals with concepts of longing for a home; the construction as well as loss of national and personal identities; language as a barrier; holy texts as markers of sameness, difference; as well as the relations between religious and political ideologies.

Trespassing Boundaries points to the importance of interpreting old texts and dual spaces within merged contexts. As a performance, Trespassing Boundaries examines collective acts of remembering and forgetting. Images attached to objects on the archeological sites refer to the creation of collective identities. In the performance, actors rename objects, images, and ultimately each other. This points to the hindrance of cultural identities and their mutual claims to origins: American, Israeli, Arabic.

Trespassing Boundaries aims to re-code and transform those limiting systems of signification within the possibilities of in-between localities. At the end of the piece, both audiences-­Israel and America--are invited to rename the objects and images found on both sites. The audience here has the opportunity to create an "archeological site" of his/her own naming and therefore a sense of belonging to a home.