Breathe

Breathe

Invited by the performance festival Faith &Terror, the Ritournelle Performance Breathe focusses on the action of breathing as a form of mantra to measure inner emotion. Poems and anagrams are created live while the repetitive aspect of breath is used for the production of sonic, rhythmical images.

With Ritournelle, Anais Héraud and Till Baumann managed to nudge me from peace to nightmare and back again. Sheets of paper flutter through the air, telling us to inhale and exhale. In the back a plastic pole circles horizontally on what looks like a modified record player, while a metronome ticks in the front. Ticking, circling, breathing — the three rhythms don’t align, but they lull me into a meditative peace. Then, slowly, the logic becomes darker, Héraud loses herself in the repetition of a phrase, pulling other words out of it as anagrams. It’s not quite terror, but it does have something of the inescapable self-reference of a dream. Dan O'Huiginn

video credit (screenshots): Katie Dunbar, Tristan Deschamps