I arrive at Morrow carrying the fatigue and pain of a long day spent in my chronically ill body. The winter sun has already set and the lights are turned low. As meditation music plays in the background–a gentle massage for my ears–I tiptoe my way through a maze of potted plants and lamps, familiar to looking for a seat in a friend’s living room. There is a bed at the front of the room, adding to this cozy, home-like feeling; a dip in its middle echoes the weight of past bodies held in its embrace. Though it is technically “on stage,” the bed marks clearly that this space is not just a performance venue, but rather is being re-imagined as a home, or perhaps even a sanctuary. 

Ghinwa Yassine’s performance “Seeing Double” has yet to begin, but this carefully curated atmosphere is already welcoming me into an experience. There is a felt intimacy to this invitation. My body interprets an invocation to rest. 

(I am relieved.)

Yassine begins by covering herself in grey. Grey slinky catsuit, grey scraggly wig, tucked between grey bed sheets. A colour that maps multiple directions of time and space: the slow and sudden process of aging, a shiny and mysterious futurism, the intangible in-between, a cloud of fog that blurs sightlines. 

The audience is transported alongside her to this in-between place as Yassine’s voice slips us into her dreamspace. Each dream acting as a chapter of a genre-bending book, the room becomes enlivened by narrations of strange and fantastical visions of unlikely lovers, sensual shapeshifting, and unlocked memories. The dreams have the absurd humour of impulsive thoughts that are usually kept tucked away in one’s mind. I chuckle not only at their ridiculous humour, but also at the relatability of knowing we all have these secret unhinged thoughts that tease us in our sleep. 

In between dreams, Yassine journeys us back to the harsh circumstances of the real world. She speaks of her homeland of Beirut, Lebanon, of bombs dropping from the hands of colonial forces, and the destruction of more than just a physical place. The stark contrast between her fantastical visions of pleasure and her unjust reality draws a clear boundary. And yet simultaneously, there is a connection being traced between these two worlds. 

Double vision is the effort of holding multiple truths simultaneously, 

the venn diagram of fiction and reality, 

the suspension between the mundane and the sacred,

the diasporic motion sickness of being here not there, 

the tug of war between a tired body and the most urgent circumstances,

the grief and the joy, always the grief and the joy.

Yassine’s radically transparent storytelling feels akin to the act of undressing, so I am surprised at her choice to keep the movement of her performing body more subtle. Moving slowly in and around the bed, wrapping herself in a soft sculpture that reminds me of a baby carrier, staring out into the audience with a determined gaze–I keep waiting for her physicality to break through, but it never does. It is not demonstrative and provocative in the way I expect performance art to be. 

Perhaps the subtlety is not simply a choice, but rather is motivated by need. I am reminded of all the reasons why people, particularly those who experience marginalization, are required to keep it together. That composure itself is a form of choreography. I sense Yassine’s need for self-preservation in the constant demand for performance and now understand why she took so much effort to create this relaxing atmosphere. But how does one get any rest when in a state of crisis? 

At first, I interpret her dreamspace as an attempt to escape–a temporary balm to cope with the grief and rage at the daily horrors. However as the work goes on, I begin to also understand it as a practice of visioning: of creating space for rest and care; a place unburdened by the structural limits of reality, where one can begin to see differently and create generative possibilities of world-building. 

Tricia Hersey describes dreaming as an essential component of the radical and liberatory practice of rest, as a form of resistance that addresses the “legac[ies] of exhaustion” created by white supremacy and capitalist grind culture.¹ She insists that systems of oppression have stolen our DreamSpace and, in response, affirms, “Rest is an ethos of reclaiming your body as your own. Rest provides a portal for healing, imagination, and communication with our Ancestors. We can work things out in a DreamSpace.”² 

Yassine’s performance not only invokes rest for herself, but asks the audience to also travel through the portal. Framing rest as a collective experience resists individualistic notions of “self-care,” insisting instead that the liberatory futures of our DreamSpace must emerge from community and our connected care.

I am reminded of Lauren Olamina’s persistent efforts to survive a fictional but eerily realistic apocalypse in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. The seed of Lauren’s grand visions for building community and collective survival begins in her dreams: “I’m learning to fly, to levitate myself. No one is teaching me. I’m just learning on my own, little by little, dream lesson by dream lesson.”³ 

Someone sitting beside me keeps letting out these big audible sighs. I let my breath slow down and deepen alongside them. I imagine our collective exhale as the air that propels our flight…

When the show ends, it feels abrupt, like the disorientation of having my morning alarm interrupt a dream that hadn’t quite concluded. As my body tries to recalibrate, I recognize the feeling I’ve had waking up every morning since I first became chronically ill: awake, but still tired, always still tired, and frankly, defeated by my inability to feel rested. I am reminded of how Yassine spoke in her performance about the inescapability of existing in a marked body. 

However, something about the instability of this ending feels apt. On one hand, it speaks to the terrifying precarity of the current world, but on the other, it honours the potentiality of our not-yet-defined future. Fluidly emerging from the collision of dreams and reality, we might not know the shape of this future, but Yassine’s performance asks that we at least trust that it will exist as long as we continue to nurture it. 

And so, I go home. I put my body to sleep. I journey to new worlds in my dreamspace. I wake up and try to live a life where those dreams inform my tangible reality. Sightlines remain blurry, but the fuzziness of that in-between place becomes the blanket upon which my body returns to rest, night after night. 

A trailer of Seeing Double by Ghinwa Yassine can be viewed here. 

Notes

1. Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2022), 18.

2. Ibid, 81.

3. Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (Open Road Integrated Media, Inc., 2000), 12. I happened to be reading The Parable Series while writing this review, though unsurprisingly, Hersey also quotes this stunning passage in Rest is Resistance, 95. 

Sarah Wong (she/they) is a writer, choreographer, and interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Grounded in the archive of their queer, disabled, and 2nd(ish) generation body, their practice traces lineages of family history, community resistance, movement across land, and slow gestures of care. They make space for the multiple, creating work that spans performance, site-specific installation, textiles, poetry, and film. In 2024, they were the recipient of ReIssue’s inaugural Art Writing Contest. Follow her work on sarahwong.ca and Instagram @swongski.