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Unsurprisingly, given the state of things, that lightness also feels like a doctors touch.

Is this thought of death painful?

Then Ill just skim my finger over it.

The audience needed to be suitably distanced, so we sat next to well-spaced white flags.

The experience … oscillated.

But her performance also hinted, as death does, at the absurd.

Still, at least it was thematically appropriate.

Thats death for you: Booted from a show you didnt even mean to attend.

(The piece continues through October 17.

The single viewer enters Troy Houries design and immediately seems to drop into deep ocean.

How long, the woman asks, can all of us hold our breath?

The crisis crushes our lungs and lives; each person experiences it alone, swimmers in a cave.

Can we hold our breaths long enough to survive?

To dive down and save our loved ones?

A digital clock at our feet ticks by the days … 198 and counting.

The end of their world, said Hunt, might be the beginning of ours.

Certainly bothA Body in a CemeteryandStatic Apneahad carried me briefly out of my own terrors.

Butwhydid it feel so energizing to think someone elses thoughts?

Hartman and Hunt and Ellis all so interested in stoppages and breakages explained it for me.

Performances, even when theyre only nine minutes long, are holes in the fabric of daily life.

They make a fissure in the accustomed, the everyday, the normal.

Theres a blue tunnel between two buildings in Brooklyn?

Theres a woman burying herself alive?

They break reality, which opens the potential for reassembly.

A wild possibility hides in each performance: Maybe when you leave, things will be different.

Hope is an aesthetic practice, said Hunt.

Nothing, Hartman agreed, her voice ringing with certainty, need be this way.

The live chat in the webinar went wild as she said it.

People wrote it over and over again, as the comment thread streamed upward.

Listeners turned her sentence into a prayer and a chant.Nothing need be this way, they wrote.Ashe.

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