David Trubridge - now an internationally acclaimed designer - and his wife Linda set off from England to sail around the world in 1981. They settled in New Zealand, and their 10 years on the water had a lasting impact on their sons Sam and William who travelled with them as small children.
Sam Trubridge was speaking at Aratoi last weekend, as the organizer of Deep Anatomy, a performance art symposium that took place in The Bahamas last year to coincide with Vertical Blue, the international free diving competition in which his brother William was participating.
'As children we both learnt how to live in the water,” says Sam who now works as a director and designer, and is founder of the performing arts company The Playground NZ. 'The first theatre production I directed was in a swimming pool, so water was always part of what I did.'
Sam says it was his brother's competitive spirit and slightly more risk taking nature - rather than any special physical abilities - that led him to become a free diver, which involves divers descending to depths unaided and holding their breath for up to nine minutes.
Denise Batchelor's current show at Aratoi - 'just one breath' - is a response to attending both events.
'There is a sense of giving yourself over to the sea and what the dive is going to be,' says Batchelor, who became fascinated by the graceful rhythm of the divers as they descended to depths unimaginable to the average person. 'At a certain depth, they go into free fall and some of them almost fall asleep as they drop down,' she says.
Trubridge had plenty of time to observe these unique athletes, as he acted as Platform Coordinator at the competition, counting down the divers and monitoring each dive on sonar.
'It's half meditation, half reading your environment and your own capabilities,' he says. 'The divers are like scientists repeating an experiment many times. They become expert at knowing how much breath to hold, how much to push their bodies and how far to go before turning back.'
Training involves both surface and depth work, and New Zealand training sites include Wellington harbor and Lake Taupo, he says. Trubridge has seen the fatal consequences of misjudgments in the sport but the allure of the deep keeps people coming back.
'It's a sublimation of the mundane concerns that you have in the everyday world. Everything else falls away when you go into this enchanting space. It can be a very profound experience,' says Batchelor. ‘Just one breath' Aratoi, until 22 May.
Caption: Left: a detail from one of the video loops in Denise Batchelor's show - 'just one breath'. Right: Denise with brother Vaughan Roberston (left), who has worked for decades as a commercial paua diver on the South Wairarapa coast, and (right) designer / director Sam Trubridge.