The Breath that Cannot Be Represented: Methodologies for Translating Respiration into Performance

For over ten years, I have had a daily breath practice. Morning or afternoon, usually at liminal times when one temporal unit changes into another, I sit for an hour and focus my attention on my breath. This breath had been with me all my life. It has enhanced my performer’s health and creativity. I am intimate with it. Yet, the experience is one I have not been able to translate into words. This difficulty has made me seek writings on breath (Irigaray, 2002; Nair, 2007; Škof and Berndtson, 2018; Nestor, 2020; Tremblay, 2022), only to discover that the challenge is widespread: nothing I have read compares to the act of breathing. Words, whether poetic, scientific or simply accurate, cannot get close to the mystery contained in respiration.

Yet, when devising works on breath, the experience of translation is different. In 2021, I created the intimate performance Breath at the End of the World. A sound recording of my voice recounts an imaginary scenario of what the atmosphere might be like on the last years of our planet. Listening through evenly-hovering-attention, the method used to orient the attention of the psychoanalyst on the patient’s speech, I note down on black cards characteristics of my current breath as it is altered by the words I hear. I share this practice with a small group of audience members, as we listen, write and fill the space with cards together. In seeking a context in which to situate this practice, I realise that most of the works on breath show only difficult respiration or breathlessness. What is it about commonplace, delightful and nourishing breath that defies dramaturgy?

Attention on breath has had a resurgence post-pandemic, particularly within performance communities. This essay explores the idea of intersemiotic translation of breath in its dramaturgical dimension, its potential for performative composition and representation. It considers what leads (or might lead) to its possibility or impossibility. I explore previous methods I have developed such as inscription in gHosting (hosting a ghost), a process by which I translated Freud’s case studies into intimate performance where words move the body and the body moves words. I then examine this in relation to Breath at the End of the World and other works on respiration, and outline a potential methodology for translation of breath into performance, taking into account inspiration, expiration and the liminal moment in between when the breath is paused and suspended. I explore the encounter between contemplative breathing practices and aesthetics, reflecting the current respiratory turn in art described by Tremblay (2022).


Works cited
Irigaray, Luce (2002) Between East and West: From Singularity to Community (trans. Stephen Pluháček), New York: Columbia University Press.
Nair, Sreenath (2007) Restoration of Breath: Consciousness and Performance, Amsterdam, New York: Radopi.
Nestor, James (2020) Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, New York: Riverhead Books.
Škof, Lenart and Petri Berndtson (eds.) (2018) Atmospheres of Breathing, Albany: SUNY Press.
Tremblay, Jean-Thomas (2022) Breathing Aesthetics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press


Biography
Laura González is an Athenaeum Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Her work inhabits the space between medical humanities, psychoanalysis, performance and Eastern thought. She has written on the seductive qualities of a famous lemon squeezer (2010), and has co-edited collections of essays on art and madness (2013) and on care (2018). She is the author of Make Me Yours: How Art Seduces (2016) and The Hysteric: Outline of a Figure (with Dr Eleanor Bowen, 2023). She has published book chapters on inter-semiotic translation (2019) and her maternal line (2020). She has translated Freud’s case histories into performance and is currently exploring the dramaturgical potential of a breath practice.
www.lauragonzalez.co.uk