NEW YORK–Inside a small theater in Queens, a lone door stands at center stage. It appears ordinary enough–plain red wood, brushed metal–but it never behaves the way a door should. It doesn’t open, doesn’t welcome, doesn’t lead anywhere. Instead, it sits there like a checkpoint frozen in place.
Eight dancers, dressed in matching gray stretch-woven costumes and smooth white masks, move toward it in sharp, contained pulses. Their bodies ripple and contract as if meeting a force the audience cannot see, a kind of invisible push that sends them back each time they get close. They reorganize, try again, and are pushed back once more, their repetition turning into its own rhythm.
Near the end of the show, one performer steps into the spotlight and lifts off her mask. Beneath it is the face of the work’s creator, choreographer Sun Kim, 35, whose own life has circled similar closed doors in the U.S. immigration system for more than a decade.
Her piece, “Alien of Extraordinary,” takes its name from the O-1 visa–the U.S. nonimmigrant category for “individuals with extraordinary ability.” The O-1 is used mostly by artists, athletes and performers and requires applicants to prove they have risen “to the top of their field” through awards, press coverage, expert letters, contracts and evidence of future work. Petitions often cost several thousand dollars in attorney and filing fees and take four to six months to approve.
But Kim’s work is not only a portrait of her own journey. At a time when immigration enforcement is intensifying and visa audits are increasing, she uses choreography to show what usually goes unseen: how U.S. immigration can narrow a life into codes, forms and expiration dates. The piece is both a reflection on her decade-long visa struggle and a broader commentary on how immigrant artists fight to stay visible. Although Kim now holds a green card, she says she created the work for those still standing in front of a closed door.
Kim has lived under the word “alien” for most of her adult life. Born and raised in South Korea, she began dancing in 2002, long before the popularity of K-pop choreography was documented endlessly on social media. Growing up, she says, she was “always shy,” the kind of kid who would rather shut herself in a room and cry than tell anyone what she was going through. “I was always struggling speaking my mind or telling my emotions, speaking up and everything,” she said. “Popping kind of made me feel strong inside and outside.”
She spent her teens in Korea's competitive street-dance world, teaching, battling, and accumulating achievements that appear perfect on the resume but didn’t always reveal who she was.“I really enjoyed it; that's the core of who I am,” she said, “But I always knew that I don’t want to do a competition. I don’t want to lose or win, I just want to be me.”
At 21, she brought a plane ticket to New York City. She didn’t speak English and didn’t imagine a clear future. She wanted, as she puts it now, “more,’ without knowing what “more” was.
New York City offered her an unexpected revelation–she was good at learning. After years of believing she was “not good at school,”she discovered she learned English quickly. “I was surprised that I’m kind of good at language,” she said. “I was like, I’m actually not bad. I’m actually not stupid.”
The city also reshaped her understanding of street dance in the city’s clubs and cyphers. Unlike Korea, where battles ruled everything and the culture had become "technique, technique, technique,” New York’s dance emphasizes music, communities and exchange. She notes that street and club dances originated in Black and brown communities in the United States, long before they spread through Japan to Korea and China. In New York’s 2010s, especially in the years before social media took over, she said the dances were “more of the feeling of music, how we feel each other” than "killing music.” Dancers from Germany, Asia, Africa and Latin America shared the floor. Support meant physically showing up in person, not leaving a comment online,
Then reality intervened. Her temporary visa neared expiration.
In her early twenties, she applied for the O-1 visa, submitting her battle wins, teaching credits and performance history as evidence. She spent weeks gathering letters, event programs, contracts and itineraries. Attorney fees and USCIS costs totaled several thousand dollars. Even then, adjudicators were unconvinced.
The denial letter arrived with a warning: she had two weeks to leave the country or fall out of status. She began to pack.
Her mother called from Korea and urged her to appeal. “This might be your last chance,” she told her. Friends wrote letters insisting she belonged in New York City. Their belief, Kim said, carried her through those days. Three weeks later, the approval arrived. The sudden reversal, the difference between leaving and staying, shifted her understanding of risk forever. “The process taught me to risk everything,” she said, “and to not regret it.”
Years later, the pandemic brought another challenge. The city shut down; theaters closed; even her part-time restaurant job vanished. With no reliable income and other options left, she chose the path she had postponed: she started her own company. In 2020, she led a small, unfunded project with 14 immigrant dancers, each given three minutes to tell a story. Out of that small experiment grew the idea for “Alien of Extraordinary.”
The central character is Hana, which means “one” in Korean, performed by all eight dancers. Hana is not a single person but a condition–the experience of living inside an immigration system that reduces identity to forms and codes. The gray costumes flatten individuality; the masks erase it. Kim says the inspiration came from how she felt preparing her petition: “like being seen as a file moving across a desk.”
“The reason I chose one character for all of us is that I wanted to tell the faceless and the voiceless people who don’t have privilege to tell their story,” she said. Some people will come to the show for her name, she knows, but she’d rather they remember her dancers. With the masks, “the audience pays attention to the body, not the person.”
In the piece, paperwork becomes repetition, and rejection becomes dancers pressing again and again against the door that never opens. The metaphor lands powerfully in 2025, as U.S. immigration enforcement intensifies, visa audits increase and thousands of workers are constrained by bureaucratic decision-making. Many people become “undocumented,” Kim said, not because they crossed a border illegally but because visas expire or their paperwork stalls. “The system doesn’t make sense,” she said.
Audience members responded audibly at the night, a collective gasp the first time a dancer hit the invisible barrier. After the show, several immigrant artists stayed for a Q & A with immigration attorney Brian Cho, asking about current immigration issues in the U.S. Kim said the impact matters to her more than any review: “I want people to see what they don’t usually see.”
Toward the end of the performance, all eight dancers gather before the door. One by one, they remove their masks. Seven step through the doorway into the light behind it. One remains. The seven turn back toward her, not celebrating, but urging her forward. Kim says the moment reflects the unevenness of immigration: some succeed, some are denied and many wait for years while their lives are paused.
Kim now holds a green card. For the first time in years, she no longer has to rebuild her O-1 case every three years to justify her existence. The mental space once devoted to archiving flyers, letters and documents has been freed for making work. Next January, her company will perform at the Guggenheim’s Works & Process series and at the Association of Performing Arts Professionals, where presenters scout companies for future seasons. She hopes to eventually tour college campuses, especially for international students who are also wondering what will come next for them.
The word “alien” will not vanish anytime soon, it remains on federal forms, stamped into the government vocabulary, and alien numbers will still be assigned to differentiate the people it describes. But in a dark theater in Queens, eight masked dancers continue to move toward a door meant to stop them, repeating the gesture until it becomes its own argument for persistence, an insistence on being seen, and a refusal to disappear by the system built to contain them.
