"I could not find a way to not keep looking," artist Shaun Leonardo told WNYC's cultural critic Rebecca Carroll, regarding the viral video footage of Eric Garner's death at the hands of Staten Island police five years ago. "I started to ask myself: how is it that we can move closer to this tragedy so that it's not reduced to some argument — to a justification of police action, or, adversely, a vilification of police action?"

So Leonardo, who is Latino and based in Brooklyn, created "I Can't Breathe." It's a multidisciplinary performance piece set in the framework of a self-defense workshop. In the piece, audience members were instructed to experience both the feeling and application of a chokehold. 

"Once you have felt the weight of that maneuver around or neck, or you've applied that maneuver to a stranger, that information that would otherwise just exist in your head gets moved to your body," Leonardo said. "And that's much more difficult to walk away from." 

Garner's dying words became a mantra and rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement — and a coda to Leonardo's work. "The staging of this piece actually transitions from a workshop format to something that is understood to be more performative," he explained. "And it ends with a collective defense of the chokehold maneuver in which all the bodies participating are on the ground. At which point, I recite 'I can't breathe' eleven times. In that moment, we best know in our bodies the sheer lack of humanity that was present in that scene."      

After touring with the piece for four years, and showing it in various venues, including schools, organizations, museums and theaters, Leonardo decided he was done. "Every time I enacted 'I Can't Breathe,' it took a little bit of life from me," he said. That he is alive, and Garner is dead, is not lost on him. "I fortunately am able to return to joy with my daughters and my wife.And that saves me. And that's something that unfortunately Eric Garner can't do."