Breath Quartet is an improvisational collaboration between Margot Wilson, Marcus Herne, Patrick Ziza and James Merrell. Using experimental and traditional tantric and shamanic breath practices such as kundalini 'breath of fire' as both a percussion and wind instrument. This film shows our first live collaboration performed at Powerhouse Studios in Surrey. Inspiration draws upon ongoing research into protoconsciousness and proto-emergence and theories such as 'the orchestral universe' led by Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose. Breath Quartet improvisations invoke ancestral voices, rhythms, and spiral flow that circulate fluidly throughout the 'body' of the quartet. Improvisational collaboration is a generative space and place for a nameless, post-ontological breath to be heard, felt, shared, inhabited, inhaled, exhaled, elevated, levitated.
Marcus Herne's original Celtic and shamanic sounds weave a sonic spectacle that urge both performers and audience to raise arms, spreads wings, and fly. Patrick Ziza's continuous flow traces the bends and pulses of the cosmic waves. James Merrell's presence and ethereal eye captures the beautiful collective organ of breath. Breath Quartet is committed to one thing, the universal basis of human life: breath. At the end of the performance we concluded that the improvisation was 'not a performance', neither was it a 'happening'. We're sitting with this.