Hold Me While I Breathe (or Lilos)

A new work about life, love & death told through inflatables.

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“Starting in darkness, we hear only the labour of his breath and sense his frustration. As he becomes more visible, we see that he’s wearing a suit and blowing up a flimsy blue lilo. When it is fully blown. He lies on it. His feet overhang the end. He struggles to get comfortable. After a while. He leaves. A young woman enters. She wears a sequinned frock. She unplugs the lilo and squeezes it until all the air has left.”

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Hold Me While I Breathe (or Lilos) is a performance work about life, love, death, and grief- told through inflatable objects. Straddling clown, dance and performance, this project is a study in how meaning emerges through the physicality and relationality of bodies, objects and movement. Four performers inflate and deflate lilos, beach balls, armbands, sex toys, pink flamingos and bouncy castles- exploring personal narratives including illness, transitioning, friendship, motherhood and the menopause, alongside broader themes of capitalism, migration and the end of the world. Based on a task-based score which always begins from inhalation and exhalation and the blowing up and deflating of objects, the scenes take on literal, metaphorical and philosophical resonances, from the mundane to the profound, the comic to the tragic, the tedious to the epic.