#The Haskell Free Library and Opera House

[darshanan-blog]

A Distinct Society: @Theatreworks Play Review

Currently playing live theater #DistinctSociety @theatreworks is not-to-miss-play of this theater season

Though it may sound like the setting of a fictional story, it’s a real place. A place that became both a beacon of hope and setting of tension during the Muslim Travel Ban implemented by the Trump Administration, in 2017. The Haskell Free Library and Opera House straddles the US, Canada border. Until now, its odd location was nothing more than a matter of curiosity for some travel enthusiasts.…

[jhavelikes]

Focusing on the Haskell Free Library and Opera House – a unique municipal site that straddles the jurisdictions of Canada and the United States – the work continually recasts the border as at once powerful yet facile, absurd yet lethal. Originally built in 1904, the Haskell building was designed as a symbol of unity between Canada and the US and is one of the only cross-border theatres in the world. Anyone can enter unchecked and, though a thick black line runs through the entire building, once inside the border all but disappears. Filmed on location to activate the legal and symbolic potential of the site, 45th Parallel unfolds as a monologue in five acts, performed by acclaimed filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel. The story centres on Hernández vs. Mesa, a judicial case covering the fatal shooting in 2010 of an unarmed fifteen-year-old Mexican national by a US Border Patrol agent. At the supreme court Mesa’s bullet, which crossed the US/Mexico border, began to implicate missiles fired in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and Libya. If this murder could be tried in the US, so too could 91,340 drone strikes.

45th Parallel — Lawrence Abu Hamdan

[e-stranger]

Abu Hamdan again

In Augustus 2022 I already wrote, here, about my interest in Lawrence Abu Hamdan in whose work art, sound research, language and politics meet. At the end of November my travels brought me to Besançon and I was happy to see the frac Franche-Comté presented an exhibition Aux frontières de l'audible on Abu Hamdan's work. (19/11/2023 - 14/04/2024) The show contains six works of which 45th Parallel from 2022 and Rubber coated steel from 2016 impressed me most.

Rubber Coated Steel is the video part (21,47 min.) of the installation Earshot. I watched the total video, absorbed by it's aesthetic and narrational force. It was delicate and needed all my attention. This was thorough sound research, which had political impact, brought as a thrilling video piece. Abu Hamdan questions how civil rights are "heard" today. The facts about the rubber bullets disguising real bullets are here.

In 45th Parallel, a video (color, sound, 15 min.) and two painted backdrops, the notion of border, often fragile, porous, absurd yet lethal, is narrated as a political and geographical grey zone in the concrete context of the Haskell Free Library and Opera House – a unique municipal site that straddles the jurisdictions of Canada and the United States (see photo of the library). Again, the facts and stories told are impressive, but what touched me especially was how strong and good in Abu Hamdan's work, research and art are entangled. Facts do "speak", but brought this way they "touch" profoundly. :) Art is a language:)

[hackernewsrobot]

The US-Canada border cuts through the Haskell Free Library and Opera House

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/26/inside-the-library-where-you-can-read-in-two-countries-at-once Comments

[thetopbestguide]

Inside the library where you can read in two countries at once | Education News

Inside the library where you can read in two countries at once | Education News

Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont – From the outside, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House looks like any other Victorian-style building from the early 20th century, complete with stained-glass windows, a grandiose façade and a slate roof. But once inside, it doesn’t take long to see that the Haskell is unlike most places. That’s because the border between the United States and…

[mubashirnews]

Inside the library where you can read in two countries at once | Education News

Inside the library where you can read in two countries at once | Education News

Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont – From the outside, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House looks like any other Victorian-style building from the early 20th century, complete with stained-glass windows, a grandiose façade and a slate roof. But once inside, it doesn’t take long to see that the Haskell is unlike most places. That’s because the border between the United States and…

[rnewspost]

Inside the library where you can read in two countries at once | Education News

Inside the library where you can read in two countries at once | Education News

Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont – From the outside, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House looks like any other Victorian-style building from the early 20th century, complete with stained-glass windows, a grandiose façade and a slate roof. But once inside, it doesn’t take long to see that the Haskell is unlike most places. That’s because the border between the United States and…

[ahnewsworld]

Inside the library where you can read in two countries at once | Education News

Inside the library where you can read in two countries at once | Education News

Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont – From the outside, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House looks like any other Victorian-style building from the early 20th century, complete with stained-glass windows, a grandiose façade and a slate roof. But once inside, it doesn’t take long to see that the Haskell is unlike most places. That’s because the border between the United States and…

[plurdledgabbleblotchits]

“Newman is the former director of the adjoining Haskell Opera House, which also straddles the border. He calls it ‘the impossible room’, as in impossible that such a venue exists. The stage is in Canada, most of the seats in the US. The border, in fact, slices through some of those seats, making the Haskell “the only opera house in the world where you can have one cheek on both sides of the border,” he said.

(black line on floor divides the opera house between Canada and the U.S.)

[lakecountylibrary]

"The library is a relic of a time when Americans and Canadians, residents say, could cross the border with simply a nod and a wave at border agents. It was the gift of a local family in the early 1900s to serve the nearby Canadian and American communities.”

[julieschulerart]

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House straddles the border between Vermont and Quebec. The front door is in the U.S.. The circulation desk and books are in Canada. Opera is performed on a Canadian stage while the audience sits in America. It is the only library in the U.S. with no books, and the only opera house in the U.S. with no stage. It is the only library in Canada without an entrance.

(http://www.atlasobscura.com/…/haskell-free-library-and-oper…)

[teamgoatsgoatsgoats]

Item 166:  Love has no borders, and neither does fun. Show two people on opposite sides of an international border crossing or wall playing a game such as charades, Pictionary, or another game that does not require them to touch or pass goods across the border.

Filmed at Haskell Free Library and Opera House.  One person did have to go through border crossing in order to do this task!

[goodstuffhappenedtoday]

DERBY LINE, VERMONT/STANSTEAD, QUEBEC (Reuters) - During the six-hour drive from New York City to a tiny town in northern Vermont, Iranian student Shirin Estahbanati cried at the thought of seeing her father for the first time in nearly three years. Since then, he had suffered a heart attack, and she hadn’t dared leave America to comfort him.

But as she traveled north, she also couldn’t stop worrying. What if she missed the turnoff and drove across the U.S.-Canadian border by mistake?

Estahbanati, like many Iranian students in the United States, has a single-entry visa and can’t leave the country without risking that she won’t be allowed back in. And her parents, as Iranian citizens, are blocked by U.S. President Donald Trump’s travel ban from visiting her in the United States.

She didn’t want to miss her destination: the Haskell Free Library and Opera House.

Estahbanati and her family had agreed to meet around 9 a.m. at the library, which through a historic anomaly straddles the U.S.-Canada border – and today has been thrust into an unlikely role as the site of emotional reunions between people separated by the administration’s immigration policies.

[gracedenton]

Instructions for a performance by Emma Goldman

Exhibition and off-site performance for the Foreman Art Gallery, Lennoxville, QC. September 5 to October 5, 2019. Conceived and directed by Adam Kinner, curated by Gentiane Belanger, and including the work of Sahar Sepahdari-Dalai.

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House is a heritage building 50km south of here that is located directly on the border. Accessible from both the U.S. and Canada, audience members sit in seats that are technically in the U.S., while the performance takes place on a stage in Canada. Adam Kinner’s project for the ArtLab takes up this site along with its historical and political exigencies in order to imagine a history that contravenes the border’s logic. Instructions for a performance by Emma Goldman re-enacts a speech that the renowned anarchist might have made in 1907 when she was traveling in the area. Sahar Sepahdari-Dalai, a performer from New York City, has re-written the speech for today. Five local artists accompany her at the Opera House, weaving their music into the speech in order to render it musical and irreducible to polemic. The exhibition presented here at the gallery does not show the performance directly, but takes up its prompts and traces, asking visitors to imagine or invent it anew. With a focus on the site and its theatrical apparatus, Kinner’s project emphasizes the relationship between nation and ensemble, state and stage, the historical and the apocryphal, in order to ask how anarchism might address itself—as music—to the nation(s).

[news-wtf]

Surveillance videos released by the Border Patrol shows the car drive by the Haskell Free Library and Opera House on July 4, nearly hitting a car as it turns onto a street in the Vermont community.

Agents apprehended the vehicle a short time later as it headed south on Interstate 91. The occupants were from Canada, France and Romania.

They were returned to Canada under special public health rules intended to minimize the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19.

The Haskell Free Library was deliberately built straddling the border in the early 20th century so people from both countries can use it. The entrance is in Vermont and before the library was temporarily closed by the pandemic, Canadians were allowed to enter the United States to visit the library without having to visit a customs post.

Since the border between the two countries was closed by the pandemic to routine border crossers, the area in front of the library has been used by people from both countries who have met friends and families there, talking across the border.

[irisavivi]

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A post shared by Iris Cohn-Avivi (@irisavivi)

Repost @ctvnews Surveillance video released by U.S. Border Patrol shows a group of people trying to enter Vermont from Quebec by driving across a library lawn and nearly hitting another car on July 4. The Haskell Free Library and Opera house was built straddling the United States-Canada border in the early 20th century. The seven occupants of the vehicle were apprehended and returned to Canada. Click on the link in the @CTVNews bio for more. #border #UnitedStates #Canada #Vermont #USCBP #caughtoncam #CTVNews https://www.instagram.com/p/CRJ8EHZpFVH/?utm_medium=tumblr