Breathwork review: An extremely intimate performance on a vast, global theme

Breathwork

Cube, Project Arts Centre

★★★☆☆

Breathwork, Éna Brennan’s new work for Irish National Opera, presents a spectacular contrast between extreme intimacy of performance and the vast, global scale of its primary theme, environmental destruction.

When the door opens, the audience – limited to just 11 – enters in silence into a small and darkened space, the electronic music already quietly playing, 11 chairs placed around a circle just big enough to contain the cast of three who stand motionless, facing each other, almost toe to toe, whispering unintelligibly, now and then coldly eyeballing one of us.

The unforgiving text is by David Pountney. It also draws from graphic, horrifically apocalyptic lines of prophecy from Isaiah. The singers – Andrew Gavin, Michelle O’Rourke and Kelli-Ann Masterson – slowly exit the circle and take up positions behind us.

[ Dublin Theatre Festival: Full coverage ]

When they begin to sing, quietly, it’s not in dialogue with one another but as though sharing the words between them, passing them around, repeating and reiterating them. “Do not drink from this well. It is poisoned. Lethal. Who did this?” The singers move separately and slowly around the circle, sometimes pausing. Something to do with their physical closeness, often directly behind you, creates a natural sense that you are not merely observing confession and lamenting but that you are part of it and fully complicit.

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“We did. We did it.”

Everything is minimal. Under director John McIlduff, the singers move minimally, mostly behind us, only once reconvening inside the circle, where they interlock briefly as though to sleep before dispersing again. They are minimally costumed in designer Sabine Dargent’s plain, cream-coloured smocks. Alan Mooney’s lighting is minimal: dark, occasionally brightening for a moment. The mood is minimal – matching the desolate subject matter and remaining still, quiet and sombre throughout – as is the total time: just 20 minutes.

In some ways the opera’s least minimal element is Brennan’s music. She generates colour and variety between the assembled forces of the singers, her electronic music, and a quartet of instruments (violin, cello, trumpet and trombone), prerecorded under the direction of Karen Ní Bhroin. Yet there is a prevailing minimalism here also. Static, clustered drone effects dominate the electronic music, and her vocal writing eventually settles into homophonic choral style, like a long church litany.

[ Éna Brennan on her first opera: ‘I’m going back to my lovely existential dread that I seem to put into all my work’ ]

The singers rise to the considerable demands of fitting their operatic voices to the tiny dimensions of the space. If she chose to, someone like Kelli-Ann Masterson could blast the 11 of us off our chairs and hold us pinned to the rear wall until her breath ran out. So when she sings directly behind you, it is breathtaking to hear such pure vocal beauty reduced to the gentle edge of audible production at such intimate proximity in what feels like a private encounter.

Breathwork is described as a companion piece to a larger composition Brennan is working on with Pountney for performance next year. And ultimately that’s what it feels like: a single, if extended, moment extracted from something else.

Breathwork continues at Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, at 3pm, 4pm, 5pm, 7pm, 8pm and 9pm on Friday, September 29th, and Saturday, September 30th