Editorial: Between Breaths

Abstract

While these phenomena are not reducible to one another, their coinciding has generated scenes of singular power, in part arising from the seemingly oppositional nature of the imagery produced: socially-distanced protest;masked oratory;cries to be let freely breathe swallowed by clouds of tear gas and pepper spray In ‘Towards a Collaborative Ergonomics: From Strangers to Symbiotic Community through Boundary Traversal in Performance’, Liang proposes the idea of ‘collaborative ergonomics’ as a way to account for the design features developed to support the cultural interactions that comprised her project ‘Inspiration’ and ‘expiration’ are the words Beckett uses to describe the breathing process, terms that capture the connection between inhalation and creativity, exhalation and death 3 ‘For the actor to conspire,’ Zarrilli tells us, ‘he must in-spire…and…ex-pire…suspended between the in-spiration and ex-piration the actor finds her way to the “edge of the breath” where thought and action hang in the balance ’4 Creative production, we might say, hangs in the balance of exchanging breath