Breath
Erin Brannigan, Breath
Breath is both compulsory and a mystery; we breathe to keep ourselves alive, but breath is also what keeps us alive despite ourselves. Its pattern of tension and release has been a source of choreographic structure. American choreographer Doris Humphrey’s modelling of dance phrases on the shape of a breath is based on a narrow definition of the same; the steady and predictable inhale–exhale pattern of restful breath, or the breath pattern associated with speech phrases. It aligns easily with dramatic phrasing which is conservative in nature—linear and logical, conforming to spectacle, language, narrative, with a climax or change in the middle. This allows for the conscious and skilled manipulation of such phrasing through interruption, diversion, suspension, acceleration, exaggeration, etcetera, all of which will affect the breathing patterns of the dancer. A conscious, skilled use of breath to fuel movement qualities links the use of breath in dance practices to somatic practices which owe much to Eastern body-mind disciplines, as noted by French dance theorist Laurence Louppe. (1)
How incoming affects—perceptions causing sensations—effect our breathing is deeply understood in our everyday lives, and is represented in terms such as breathtaking, breathless, it took my breath away … The relationship between sensation and breath—how sensations can catalyze variations in breathing—thus speaks to the connections between perception and breath. The dancer’s engagement with breath moves this perceptual engagement with breath into action.
1. Louppe, Poetics of Contemporary Dance, p. 57.
Bianca Hester
Breathing Smoke
We woke, and the smoke was here. We woke because of the smoke. This smoke: a material-temporal convergence registering the process of transformation of a countless billion trees burning for weeks on end, while planetary loads of carbon sequestered inside their ligneous bodies were released – volatile and circulating thick in the atmosphere. This smoke, a particulate admixture of botanical–animal bodies metabolised by the fires raging all summer long, directly demonstrating what Blanche Verlie argues is ‘the limitation of our very breath…as the toxic embodiment of climate change.’ (1) You will probably remember how the fires consumed vast swathes of sclerophyll and rainforest in places that had never encountered fire before. You probably also heard about how the ash and dust from the blaze travelled on wind currents as far as Aotearoa, tinting glaciers a yellowish-brown in the South Island. (2)
This smoke: through the windows, in the house, in the bedroom, amongst the sheets, in your hair, in our noses, inhabiting our lungs.
This smoke shrouding both the sun and the moon, sometimes at once.
This smoke so dense that we could stare square at the sun – an orange stranger filtered thick through perpetual dread, for as long as we liked.
This smoke featuring with ‘no filter’ on a cascade of Instagram pictures churning out of Sydney.
This smoke dematerialising the neighbour’s houses on every street and settling onto parked cars. The particles of this smoke overriding the familiar accumulation of coal dust on our windowsills, extracted day-and-night over the hill blown in weekly by the westerlies.
The smell–taste of this smoke – inescapable – as it was delivered to the door upon furious pyro–winds in advance of the inferno, raging just over the edge of the escarpment. This smoke announcing a damaged future – which is no longer situated on a distant temporal horizon – but is instead materialising in the present as it envelops us within an ashen shadow of ‘our’ own making. This smoke made us cry on the 22nd day of its seemingly endless visitation.
1. Blanche Verlie, “Feeling Climate (in)justice,” Postdoctoral Fellowship Lecture, Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney, September 14, 2022.
2. Elanor Ainge Roy, “New Zealand glaciers turn brown from Australian bushfires, smoke, ash and dust: Snow-capped peaks and glaciers discoloured as former PM says ash could accelerate glacial melting,” The Guardian, January 2, 2020.