In the early days of the pandemic, when someone passed too close to me on the street or in the grocery store, I held my breath.
I thought of that first.
Just a few weeks earlier, on a night of wine-drinking and chatting, one of my semiregular panic attacks seized me; I doubled over in the bathroom, heaving and clutching my chest while a friend coached me through inhales and exhales.
I thought of that second: the fear that confronts me in those moments I seem to forget the most basic function of my body.
These are the scenes that played in my mind at “Static Apnea” a short but frightening performance installation that immerses you in the sensation of suffocating underwater — but could just as easily go a few toes further into the deep.
Conceived and directed by Christopher McElroen, who wrote the script with Julia Watt, “Static Apnea” is fascinating to behold even before you set foot in the space: A 40-foot-long storage container in Carroll Gardens, in a narrow lot next to an Eileen Fisher, is home to the piece, which is presented by the American Vicarious and the Invisible Dog Art Center.
The pitch-black interior feels like a perverse fun house: You navigate through a narrow, winding path with mirrors on each side until a walkway appears. (Troy Hourie did the daunting design.) The walls to your left and right glow a rich cobalt (the vivid lighting is by Zach Weeks), and, later, other piercing shades, that give the unnerving sense of being surrounded — trapped, even — by water.
And of course that’s the point. At the end of the walkway, behind a pane of glass, an actress appears (in my performance, Isabella Pinheiro; in others, Jenny Tibbels) to speak, in a series of lyrical fragments, about static apnea, the practice of holding one’s breath underwater for as long as possible.
The record for a woman: 9 minutes and 2 seconds.
Fittingly, the performance is short enough to fit in that very same pocket of breath. Pinheiro urges you to breathe with her and hold your breath with her. She cascades through a number of questions: “What does blue feel like? Can you breathe it in?” Then later, “Do you know what failure depth means?” Her voice seems to echo in the space (Andy Evan Cohen did the stellar sound design), and though her questions prod, her voice is affectless and gently mesmerizing.
First presented in 2017, “Static Apnea” stands on its own, but is now saddled with implications that it doesn’t directly engage: an illness that ravages the respiratory system; a Black man who, while pinned under a police officer, declared that he couldn’t breathe.
In a production that emphasizes the intimacy of one-on-one interaction between viewer and actor, it adheres too stringently to its stylistic austerity. Though this was the closest I’ve been to a performer in months, with just a pane of glass between us, Pinheiro felt more distant than ever.
The script, full of elegant queries, is over so soon, offering just a taste of what a more penetrating version would look like: What actually happens during the process of drowning? What does that feel like?
In her stunning poem “The Five Stages of Drowning,” Patricia Smith slowly details each of those steps, taken from the true story of a child tossed into the water. “The startled river opens, then closes over her, the way a new mother would,” she writes.
“Static Apnea” had me holding my breath, but was just shy of breathtaking.
Static Apnea
Through Oct. 17 at the Invisible Dog Art Center, Brooklyn; theinvisibledog.org
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