The Visibility of Breathing: Flute Performance Practice, Collaborative Composition, Performance Art, and Resilience

This body of practice-based performance and collaborative composition research consists of
the documentation of four substantial creative projects alongside a contextual and critical
commentary. This research contributes to a growing area of scholarship that engages hybrid
music practice and, as such, provides vital case studies to better understand entangled
‘performer’ roles of interpreter, advisor, improviser, deviser, curator, and co-composer.

The creative work is positioned simultaneously within performance art and concert music
paradigms, to provide new knowledge in conceptual work situated within a diverse, musicfocused,
artistic practice. The research considers the performer’s body, including its abilities
and limitations, as a catalyst and starting material for new creative work, and in doing so
provides new knowledge on the relationship between breathing, air, the environment, and
flute performance and composition practice.

By further situating this creative work within specific examples of physical and social
trauma, the work maps and draws parallels between an evolving creative musical practice
and a personal trajectory towards overcoming and developing resilience. Within this, the
work and accompanying commentary serve as a critical examination of issues including:
music and ableism; music performance practice and female body image; music-making as
self-improvement; and complex artistic collaborative relationships in which the focus is the
performing body, trauma, and resilience.