Playing with Then and Now

Abstract

Attempting to distinguish between theatre and performance art, Marina Abramović insisted that, ‘to be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake… The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.’ Reaching for the most extreme of examples, Abramović couched her argument in the language of violence and mortality to make her point. Strikingly though, while she speaks of knives and blood, she does not mention breath. In ‘Playing with Then and Now: The Liveness of Breath,’ I argue that this is because breath challenges such a simple dichotomy, as the inexorable links between air, breath, life and liveness mean that a focus on breath can highlight new ways of thinking about live performance. More specifically, I explore how three recent performances – the docudrama Black Watch (Gregory Burke, 2006) and two pieces of performance art, Felicitaciones (Eduardo Oramas, 2014), and Running out of Air (Didier Morelli, 2011) – foreground breath and breathlessness, manifestly playing with air, in order to call attention to the shifting sands that underpin live performance, fraying the edge between live and archive, performance and memory, now and then, life and death.