Alex Belluck

Alex Belluck (she/they) is a writer, performance artist, and critic whose work interrogates queerness, aliveness, and the relationship between mothers and daughters. Prior to completing the master’s program in Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, Alex studied at Yale University where she received a B.A. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Project Title: Life after Breath

Project Description: A gust of wind slammed a door. The end of breathing, of living. Stagnation resulting in permanent suspension. She dissolved into no place. She became an attic of sealed-off memories. Her total relaxation smoothed out all sharp edges. No wave would crash again on her shores. The body that only became a body after its final exhale lay in stillness, or maybe it floated as if it were featherweight—as light as air.

I crawled into bed with my mother's body. For several minutes, we shared a liminal space between living and that which comes after dying. Just as she had once delivered oxygen to me, I tried to breathe for both of us. Her chest lifted and lowered the white sheet pulled up to her neck. Its rising and falling had, at one point, rocked me to sleep as I lay on her. I thought about the nights she had stayed awake to listen to my jagged breathing. She sat with me, too, during countless nebulizer treatments. As she was dying, a soft rush of air replaced speech. She breathed in my “I love you” and responded with an exhale. I held my face close enough to hers that I could feel her breathing tickle my cheek.

This performance engages with the idea of phantom breathing. By exploring the sounds and sensations of breathing, I interrogate the relationship between breathing and aliveness. Breathing is the residue of living. I treat breathing as a bridge: between embodiment and disembodiment, living and dying. When we breathe, we shuttle between these states, blurring them—as if to defer, endlessly, any possibility of arrival.