‘This is My Life’

Abstract

Scottish music teacher Kirsty Young's autobiographical piece, LipSync (Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 2019) dealt with Young's life shortening illness cystic fibrosis (CF), where the lungs are filled with mucus, and their capacity incrementally damaged. Portraying the interludes of hospitalization familiar to CF sufferers, and at the two-metre safe distance that they are required to keep from each other because of the danger of cross-infection, Young and non-CF suffering actor Ailsa Davidson performed snatches of Billy Joel's hit pop song, ‘My Life’ (1978), at different speeds and in different moods, affectively and temporally measuring the progress of Young's failing breath. This article explores the prescience of Lipsync in using song to express human capacities for care and survival, developing a musical dramaturgy of care with Cumbernauld Theatre, and in so doing exposing the precarity of bodies normally ‘disavowed’ in the economically-driven political field (Butler 2015). It reflects on singers’ ‘disidentification’ from the suffocating conditions of dominant culture (Muñoz 1999; Chambers-Letson 2018), and draws on the work of Martin O'Brien (2016, 2020) with regard to the experience of the embodied self from the perspective of a person with CF in relation to social and material environments The article suggests that when air is in short supply, or when breath is disrupted, existing embodied knowledge of the orderings of the world is brought to attention. Breathing in such knowledge, it argues, can reposition listeners accustomed to experiencing song as a site of pleasure, leading to more acute perception of the uneven distribution of vital resources.

In cultural understandings of music in Western European history, harmonic sounds resonate with the order of the heavenly spheres. Song has been understood as divine or creative inspiration, resonating with the wonders of the natural and spiritual world. Yet as a cultural activity, singing is also influenced by modes of subsistence available, and the ways that lives are valued culturally and economically. Many events in 2020 showed that while in performance practice the breath has been associated with transformative power (Magnat 2020: xv), in other contexts it is subject to severe constrictions. In fact, the situated histories of breathing express the world’s most dreadful disorders. In the UK, the death of nine-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah from acute respiratory failure was ruled by a coroner to have resulted from exposure to air pollution. Thirty-nine Vietnamese migrants died from suffocation after being deprived of air in the truck container of an Irish driver. Among them was Tra My, whose final text to her mother read, ‘I can’t breathe’. Her words were the same as those of Black man George Floyd, whose death was witnessed by the world on internet footage from the USA as he was murdered undergoing a police chokehold procedure. Theatre scholar Fintan Walsh commented that breathing itself, in spite of its use as a solution to manage anxiety, had become the problem, ‘a vaporous stage of ecological, medical and political battle’ (2020: 227). When the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 came, all breath became potentially contaminated, carrying toxic exhalation that could fatally infect others. Do Not Resuscitate orders were placed on disabled and vulnerable patients in UK hospitals with COVID-19, as if to suggest the expendability of these lives. To put it starkly, the same breath that performers measure out in song also seemed to be revealing the orders of the world, namely who and what are resourced to breathe and flourish, to thrive and survive.

In this article, I want to reflect on Kirsty Young’s LipSync (2019) as a show that addressed her life as a person with Cystic Fibrosis (CF), whose life-shortening condition necessitates choices and negotiations that severely qualify the sense of freedom and agency that the liberal Western world order tends to value so highly.¹ Like COVID-19, CF attacks the body’s airways. A thick mucus affects the lungs, and symptoms include persistent coughing and wheezing. Enduring the condition entails submission to a strict regime of appointments, procedures and medicines, as well as periods of social isolation and hospitalization. A gifted singer from childhood, trained in classical singing and now working as a music teacher, Young’s capacity to sing has declined as her CF has progressed, eroding the lung function needed to manage the breath control required for the demands of the classical repertoire. LipSync, which told the story of her life through dialogue and song, was developed by Cumbernauld Theatre in Scotland. I saw it at the Summerhall venue in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2019—near the beginning of what can be for performers a gruelling month of shows. Young performed LipSync alongside Ailsa Davidson, the performers identically dressed in protective white overall suits and seated 2 metres apart as if socially distancing. The two women’s vocal performance was ‘synced’, with lines of script spoken or sung simultaneously or finished off by the other. In this article I will be attending particularly to Young’s singing, at times disordered by the involuntary coughing that disrupted her breath, and her use of the song ‘This Is My Life’ (1978), as a performance that enacted embodied knowledge of the constraints on and resourcing of creative desire and potential. Though singing expresses the gifts of living and aspires to creative possibilities of life, disruptions to breath can reveal the difficulties of achieving these possibilities and the need to make efforts to sustain them. I suggest that Young’s singing, and the cough that disturbed it, enacted a critique of the ‘management’ of breath in performance, in medicine and in culture. I also reflect on ways that respirational ‘disorders’ in singing might suggest our needs for each other.

I write this neither from the perspective of a person with CF, nor as a person who has been trained to sing. (Like many others, I was told when I was young that I couldn’t.) Rather, I write from the position of a person who on countless occasions has been intensely touched or enthralled by singing voices, and moved to understand more about the lives of those who sing. This article aims to emulate Susan Stryker’s efforts to think through the histories and metaphorics of breath in critical thought by using a critical practice that aims to ‘transpire’ or ‘breathe across difference’ (Stryker in Stephens and Selberg 2019: 113). I do not by any means wish to erase the unique experience of any person who sings, but to explore the mechanisms of voice as a critical focus that locates them in relation to the ideologies, histories and circumstances that they negotiate in order to live as creative beings. I have been inspired by Angela Davies’ commentaries in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1999), where she considers singing as an embodied aesthetic mode carrying historical resonance of the constriction of breath in the USA. The work of cultural theorists such as José Esteban Muñoz and Joshua Chambers-Letson has enabled me to reflect on singers’ ‘disidentification’ from the suffocating conditions of dominant culture. Through this, I am aiming to practise a feminist phenomenology, where embodied experience is the ground of knowledge, and the knowledge and understanding of the body are felt and heard. Like Jean-Thomas Tremblay, who in his article ‘Feminist Breathing’ explores how racial dimensions interact with both the vitality and vulnerability of breathing, I recognize that when ‘breathing calls attention to itself’ in the ‘ongoing exchange between individuals and milieus’, there are both phenomenological and cultural factors at play (Tremblay 2019: 97). Such cultural factors, as I suggest in relation to Roland Barthes’ preference for sensory engagement with the ‘grain’ of the singing voice rather than the breath that sustains it, need to be recognized at the site of listening that determines our responses to vocal performance.

To help me understand the experience of the embodied self in relation to social and material environments from the perspective of a person with CF, I have turned for assistance to the work of Martin O’Brien, a fellow lecturer in the Drama Department at Queen Mary University of London where I work, whose own performance practice explores his embodied experience and response to this chronic genetic condition. O’Brien has reflected on the ways that an experience of CF could help to think through ‘what a wider population might understand about illness, mortality, and isolation’ (O’Brien 2020: 4). His work points out how in times of emergency, the population as a whole can learn from those to whom a state of crisis is diurnal. The practices of singing during the COVID-19 pandemic, I am arguing, by way of a consideration of breath disrupted, brought embodied knowledge of the orderings of the world to the fore. Breathing in such knowledge repositions listeners, leading to more acute perception of the uneven distribution of vital resources.

MANAGING BREATH

In the history of Western classical singing an emphasis on respiration as a means to serve purity of tone and articulatory precision has led to a practice that aims to eliminate the disorders of breath. As Potter’s and Sorrell’s A History of Singing demonstrates, a vast range of exercises has been developed to enable singers to control and support the breath, and through this improve their ability to produce a consistency of tone, enunciate clearly, convey emotion precisely and avoid deviation from a musical score (Potter and Sorrell 2012: 49, 94, 124). In the early church, whose practices were a direct influence on the development of vocal music, choral singing in religious contexts, where breath is pneuma or soul, seemed to conceal the need to breathe entirely, giving the impression of the flow of continuous sound. Congregational singing was disallowed in favour of the pure tones of trained choristers (Bennett 2017: 1). The first pedagogical treatise of singing to be based on scientific knowledge and principles was Manuel Patricio Rodriguez García’s A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing (published in 1841), which went on to form the basis of conservatoire training in Europe and the USA (Potter 1998: 55). According to García, who developed the use of the laryngoscope to observe vocal anatomy, the lungs are ‘indispensable agents of respiration’ ascending into ‘a single elastic pipe’ known as the trachea, and perform a function ‘analogous to the bellows of a church organ’, furnishing the wind ‘required for producing the different sonorous vibrations’ made in singing (García 1857 [1841]: 5). In order to produce ‘pure’ and ‘strong’ notes, a singer must cultivate an ‘economy of the breath’, undergoing a very strict regime of exercises. ‘No persons can ever become accomplished singers’, García advises, ‘until they possess an entire control over the breath—the very element of sound’ (7–10). With well-directed training it is possible to correct imperfections of those voices that are ‘ill-governed’, ‘deficient in neatness, breadth and firmness’, or to enable the singer to conceal vocal ill-health by ‘varying extemporaneously’ or ‘skillfully passing over a difficult passage’ (42). In García’s pronouncements the location of responsibility for breathing disorders lies firmly in the singer’s ill-disciplined body.

Efforts to conceal and control breathing persist in contemporary classical singing training, where the ongoing preoccupation with good tone arguably continues to suggest both the subordination of the performer’s body to the musical score, and of the body to the artistic will. Emphases on the performer’s health, balance and self-care, widespread in the discourses and practices of both freelance and conservatoirebased contemporary voice trainers, seem in some ways to enforce singing as a technology of discipline in which ‘order’ is necessary. Contemporary training methodologies, such as the widely practised Alexander Technique, where bodily tension is released through the breath, aim to centralize the performer’s body. The highly technical, physiologically informed practices of Jo Estill enable performers to develop awareness of their own vocal anatomy (Bennett 2017: 10). Such approaches, even with their profound preoccupation with vocal health, can result in an uncomfortable or alienated relationship with breath. For singing trainer Anne-Marie Speed, who follows Estill’s influential practice, any ‘breathiness’ that interferes with the production of ‘clear tone’ is a problem to be shifted, and/or a sign of vocal ill-health for which medical intervention could be required (Speed 2012). Another Estill practitioner, Mary McDonald Klimeck, has written that her desire to sing caused her to have an ‘adversarial’ relationship with her breath (McDonald Klimek 2019). Arden Kaywin, a classically trained practising voice teacher and contemporary singer-songwriter, advocates ‘proper breathing support’ in order to eliminate fear or a tension which ‘contributes to us making the very sound we are afraid of’ (Kaywin 2020). Her comment suggests a continuing anxiety in vocal production provoked by the subordination of breathing to the need for smoothness, purity and clarity of sound, and points to a fear of the disorders of the body that the uncontrolled voice threatens to betray.

The control of breath is also a theme in critical studies. A series of 1970s essays by Roland Barthes, for example, explored singing and music as embodied practices, their ways of signifying and modes of reception. Barthes conveyed a profound disdain for the art of the ‘bellows’ in singing that in his view tended to reduce signification to cultural cliché, or to meanings made by ideological or institutional authorities. ‘Emotive modes’ of emission, he propounds in his much-cited essay ‘The Grain of the Voice’, are perpetuated by the ‘myth of breath’, where ‘the whole art of song’, according to misguided music teachers, is ‘in the mastery, the proper management of breathing!’ Such a style, he argues excitedly, ‘vaccinates enjoyment’ (Barthes 1991 [1972]: 270–1). His choice of words resonates strongly in the ongoing context of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which I write, where both medical and cultural vaccination offer to calm society’s collective breathing. Significance in Barthes’ essays has been found in his aural engagement with the embodied textures of voice, and it is important to recognize how his enjoyment is inflected with his own particular cultural preferences. The pleasure that he centralized in the site of signification in musical listening is erotically inflected with his admiration for French baritone Charles Panzéra and his rendition of the French mélodie. Aimée Boutin argues that Barthes’ concept of the ‘grain’ is ‘useful precisely because it articulates the relationship between the singularity, individualization, or contingency of voice originating in a particular place, time, and speaking body, and the plurality of cultural convention’ (Boutin 2017: 165). Barthes’ writings reveal that the ‘body in the singing voice’ is ‘always already an enculturated body’, and that listening is itself culturally constructed (165). To put it more simply, both singing and listeners’ responses embody, convey and sustain the orders of society.

In Disidentifications (1999), José Esteban Muñoz acknowledges how Barthes’ work has been ‘foundational’ in helping to unpack ‘the ruses and signs of normativity’ of dominant culture (loc. 627). For Muñoz, song, like fiction, is capable of calling the singer into being in a mode of ‘disidentification’; writing in song is a ‘technology of the self’, where the singer with ‘utmost precision’ reworks the song as part of a self-representational act. Performance is thus capable of recomposing and reordering the values and tastes of the dominant order, of making the world differently. Drawing on Muñoz in After the Party (2018), Chambers-Letson hears in the voice of Nina Simone an ‘ephemeral instantiation’ of personal and historical meaning, in whose textures, folds and rhythms materializes desire for something better than this (8). In his analysis of Simone’s vocal performance, her desires and demands squeeze out between and beyond her words, as she ‘reterritorializes’ her flesh through the act of singing. His elucidation of Simone’s passionate singing and virtuosic playing, emancipating Bach according to Chambers-Letson from the majoritarian order, is initiated with a moment of failure when singing at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976, where Simone’s ‘wish for freedom’ as she ‘pushes it into the air in front of her’ is hard to sustain.

As her ‘voice falters’, the ‘word crackles apart’ (2). I would argue that in such a moment of disordering, when the unreliability of the body is exposed under the weight of the ‘chains’ to which Simone’s song refers, the breath is caught by the attention of listeners. The break in Simone’s voice, the unplanned-for glitch in her vocal shaping, suspends a moment in time in which unvoiced affect permeates across jointly breathed air. The listener’s pleasure is modulated with a feeling of ache, partly caused by the knowledge that Simone’s song is overwhelmed by the cultural circumstances that inform it, and partly composed of the listener’s own experience of loss of auditory contact with her voice.

For people with CF, regardless of the multiple ways in which they might identify themselves culturally, the observation of a medicalized regime of ‘pulmonary management’ is advised (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence 2021). In the treatment of the condition, which triggers a persistent cough caused by the sticky mucus that blocks the respiratory passages, the lungs and other internal organs have to be strictly monitored. Lung capacity is frequently taken, a lung function spirometry test measuring how much air can be exhaled in one forced breath. This regime is not only an ongoing encounter with a sense of mortality, but also with the values that determine the chances and conditions of survival. The results are used to decide treatment plans, and to decide eligibility for medicine and medical trials. In this respect people with CF are hailed as a product of ‘a speciality market for giant pharmaceutical companies’, and are subject to the cost-effectiveness models that according to their potential users do not always appreciate the full value of treatments (Young 2019b). In 2019, with a lung capacity of less than 40 per cent, Young became eligible for the new breakthrough CF drug Symveki. Young’s sister, Shona, with around 70 per cent capacity, did not qualify. CF is not contagious to people who do not have it but contact with other people with it must be restricted because of the dangers of crossinfection. Because damaging bacteria can be passed between people with it, they have to stay more than 2 metres apart—even when siblings. This deprives people with CF of opportunities to laugh or play together, and is socially atomizing, preventing them sharing experiences with each other.

Under such circumstances, singing can play a beneficial role in ‘pulmonary management’, helping to strengthen the muscles at the side of the lungs that support breathing, or helping to combat poor mental health. Participants with CF in Scottish Opera’s Breath Cycle research project with Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow, for example, commented on the helpful effects of singing together online, reporting that it was the first time some of them had worked or socialized with others with the condition (Breath Cycle 2013).² As Young prepared for her run at the Edinburgh Festival, she told an interviewer that she considered music as a ‘comfort’ rather than an ‘aspiration’—as if to suggest she once had the kind of dreams which appear to motivate many a young performer’s plans for a musical career and enrolment in conservatoire or private vocal training programmes (2019a). Her emphasis on relief resonates with the familiar association of music with health and wellness rather than with the ambition for a musical livelihood. Music, according to Tia de Nora, can provide an ‘asylum’ that makes it possible for people to ‘flourish’, to feel pleasure and to experience ‘the absence, or temporary abatement, of pain’ (2013: 1). For a person with CF, whose respiration demands medical and social support, energy and resources, a choice of a career in singing beyond ‘asylum’ must be balanced with the need for and access to resources that support them to breathe. In the UK the Cystic Fibrosis Trust runs the campaign ‘Life Unlimited’ to advocate for conditions in which people are ‘able to breathe freely’, enjoy ‘the same opportunities as everyone else’, be able to live spontaneously and take ‘control of their destiny’ (2021). When Young sings ‘This Is My Life’, as I explore below, the song’s lyrics are made to resound with a pointed commentary on her constricted circumstances and aspirations to a creative career.

THIS IS ‘MY LIFE’

In LipSync Young chose snatches of ‘My Life’, a song originally written and performed by singersongwriter Billy Joel, to punctuate her story. In his song, Joel voices an act of rejection of the ‘American way’ and his determination to carve out a life according to his own desires (Joel 1978). Resonating with Joel’s own defiant decision to drop out of school to be a musician, the song references a friend choosing a career in stand-up comedy. The track suggests an absolute rejection of victimhood and a spiky assertion of the right to self-expression through a creative career: ‘I don’t care what you say anymore, this is my life’. Joel’s singing and raunchy rock-and-roll piano style are punchy, confident, full of the rhythmic strut of his self-reliance. Performed in sync by Young and Davidson sat at hospital bedside tables 2 metres apart, individual lines from ‘This Is My Life’ brought the ‘choices’ permitted to a person with CF and presented in LipSync sharply into focus: ‘I don’t want you to worry for me ’cause I’m alright’ / I don’t want you to tell me it’s time to come home’. Rather than a confident expression of individualism, ‘My Life’ became a comment on the negotiation made in the life of a person with CF between creative potential and constraint. To borrow terminology from Muñoz, Young’s appropriation was used to ask questions of the ‘field of self-production’ in which the possibilities of creation occur (1999: loc. 611). How is a person with CF to live ‘my life’ when individual autonomy is taken for granted? What does a creative life mean when a shortage of breath constricts potential? Young reworked the song’s rebellious gesture to disidentify with and reorder a culture in which self-determination and non-conformity are admired but not always available to everyone on the same terms. As her story progressed, the performers played with the lines, speeding them up, slowing them down, changing the familiar chord progressions that gave Joel’s decision momentum and certainty. Young’s renditions drew attention to the perceptions of temporality and affective intensities experienced by a person with CF. Certain lines became chant-like, taking on a kind of apotropaic quality that suggested how singing might help to shut out anxiety produced by the condition and its management.

For me, hearing this familiar song interrogated and reordered in this way posed a further question: What would be the consequences of obeying the singer’s plea to ‘Go ahead with your own life but leave me alone’? As LipSync went on, Young’s gentle coughing became audible, a sound that betrayed to the audience which of the two outwardly healthy young women was fated to the incurable condition. Her involuntary cough, suppressed but persistent, shivered through the auditory mechanisms of the audience and their bodies. These ruptures of pneumatic control, so circumvented and smoothed over in singing training, functioned to upstage and ambush both the performers and their audiences, disordering the pleasure with which the ‘grain’ of the voice in singing is received.

In his article ‘You Are My Death’, O’Brien traces the evasion of the cough in philosophy as that which ‘molests the vocal organs, barely fit for thought’ (2020: 4). His observations relate to the mind/body dualism that has plagued Western thought and culture, and which the singing voice promises to transcend, in the belief in its ‘ascent to divinity’ (Dolar 2006: 31). As Simon Bayley puts it, the cough is the ‘creature voiced’ (2011: 166). As such it has the capacity to undo the months and years of discipline which singers undergo to achieve the impression of effortlessness. In Steven Connor’s formulation, ‘the cough is voice coerced by breath, neither breath tuned and tutored into voice’, nor ‘impressed into audible shapes and postures’, but ‘escaping, as through a rent or a gash’ (2007). David Appelbaum also emphasizes the violence of its action, ‘the cough is the detonation of the voice’ (1990: 2). For O’Brien, the cough is ‘the disordering of the voice and of the breath’. It is the ‘voice of illness’ that ‘demands its right to be heard’, and ‘speaks directly to the flesh of others’ (O’Brien 2016: 132). Applying O’Brien’s insight to Barthes’ understanding of singing, it would seem that the cough can cause a disruption of the point of signification that the listener receives at the site where the singing body meets language and culture. But if, as O’Brien argues, the cough ‘speaks’ directly to the flesh of others, its ‘speech’ also disrupts the mode of pleasure emphasized by Barthes. Triggering the ‘alert’ (Barthes 1991: 245) mode of listening, which according to Barthes is purely physiological, I would argue that this interruption by the body puts the listener in touch with the different rhythms of life lived with CF. In the disrupted effort of song to be effortless, the cough ‘speaks’ of the singer’s negotiation of desire and constraint within the social structures that support or suppress her flourishing, ‘demanding’ that the listener becomes aware of the effort to breathe and that structures of care are needed. Rather than singing as life support, as in common understandings of music for well-being, the listener becomes aware that life support enables singing.

‘YOU’LL NEVER WALK AL ONE’?

Some years before the COVID-19 pandemic, O’Brien noticed while on a train journey how his involuntary coughing caused another traveller to move away, their body responding, he thought, with an instinctual fear of potential contagion (2016: 129). In 2020, noting that ‘disgust and fear’ towards his body became much worse, O’Brien argued that the cough became ‘synonymous with the virus’, a reminder that ‘[t]he cougher holds your mortality in their chests, and you hold theirs in yours’ (2020: 5). As the shower of airborne droplets expelled through the breath were adjudged to be unsafe, the normal order of society was undone, and singing itself, like coughing, was officially deemed a potential passer of death.

Ordered to stay away from each other, people continued to sing out safely a desire to be together. It was as if music returned to its ritualistic function, expressing the ‘shared concerns and mutual dependence’ upon which society relies—a kind of guarantor of herd immunity in the face of threat (Potter and Sorrell 2012: 21). News reports were rounded off with uplifting snippets of music and song, as if they were missives of the human soul. An online version of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ (1945) was recorded by 99-year-old Captain Tom Moore, a British Army veteran who with the aid of a Zimmer frame had walked 100 lengths of his garden to raise money for the National Health Service (NHS). Musical theatre performer Michael Ball’s apparently effortlessly soaring vocals, backed by the voices of the front-line health care workers of the NHS Voices of Care Choir, seemed to ‘vaccinate’ the myth of British resilience (Barthes 1991: 271). Ball was able to mobilize his celebrity in this fund-raising effort, but many musicians and theatre makers lost their livelihoods, with 70 per cent unable to undertake more than a quarter of their usual work (Musicians’ Union 2020). The collective disability arts alliance #WeShallNotBeRemoved warned of the effect of the lockdown on creative opportunities for artists and access to the arts for disabled audiences (Hutchinson 2020).

Yet thousands of performers, many in dire straits, laboured to breathe new life into the fractured and ailing social body. Disabled and non-disabled musicians and singers, amateurs and professionals, developed socially distanced digital methods of practising song. The English National Opera mobilized music’s restorative properties through its government-funded online Breathe social prescription project, using lullabies to tranquillize the anxiety of rehabilitating COVID-19 patients, and to help them find strategies for ‘self-management’ in convalescence (ENO 2020). Scottish Opera recommended the singing exercises developed through the Breath Cycle project for those suffering from COVID-19. Out of work singers brought West End numbers to families’ doorsteps, or to care homes, serenading elderly residents through the glass windows behind which they were shielded. Such activities performed a cradle of care, making evident the interdependency of collective being. If the legacy of the pandemic, as O’Brien argued, was that it is no longer possible to ignore the cough as a symptom of mortality, singing in this time of plague materialized a working model, albeit frayed and fretted with cares and anxieties, that allowed people to rehearse and to enact a life with great attention to the bodily presence of others.

Young did not work alone in the making of LipSync, which was created as part of Cumbernauld Theatre’s Invited Guest community programme. Its dramaturgy, developed with creatives Ed Robson, Jenna Watt and Amy Angus, provided a scaffold to enable her to tell her story. In August 2019, in the run-up to the Edinburgh Festival, Young could not be sure that she would be able to perform every day as the schedule of a full run at Edinburgh demands. Because of this, a dramaturgy was needed that would conserve rather than expend the supply of air. Microphones were used throughout, a choice that enabled the hushed tones preferred in medical wards to which people with CF frequently retire, and which, in practical terms, afforded a necessary economical vocal delivery and conservation of breath. For the majority of the show both performers were static and seated 2 metres apart as if socially distancing, also enabling the conservation of energy. As I have described, Young’s singing and speaking were alternated and ‘synced’ with that of Davidson, enabling her to carry the show through to its end vocally in spite of her declining lung capacity. On the days when Young was too ill to perform at all, Angus took her place by Davidson’s side, lending her breath to Young’s song in her absence.

The disordering of breath in live singing, for all the strength, solidarity and joy expressed in song in so many circumstances, is a reminder of the fragility and delicacy of the body and its need for supplies of good air. Philosopher Judith Butler reminds us that we are ‘by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own’ (2004: 28). On the somatic disorders induced by grief she writes that those moments outside one’s control are evidence of the ‘fundamental sociality of embodied life’ (28). Catching the breath of another as they try to speak or sing might under certain circumstances instil in the listener a sense of desperate cultural injustice. As performance artist Vanessa Macaulay puts it, even speaking of the fatal constrictions of others’ breath lies ‘heavy on the chest’ (2020). Where an acute medical condition is a factor in disordered breathing, a listener might catch a sense of the anxieties generated in individuals living in a neoliberal culture where efficiency is mistaken for fairness. Gabrielle Goodrow cautions of the risk that in a society where the citizenry is ‘steeped in bodily anxiety’, people will ‘agitate not for more public support for non-normative bodies and lives’, but for more individual access to technologies that will keep bodies working and ‘valuable to the system’ for longer (2019: 144). The pandemic has made many people less neglectful of the knowledge that we are valuable to each other because of the pleasures we take in mutuality and by virtue of the bonds we feel for one another. If a dramaturgy of care that supports the flourishing of all citizens is to be materialized in the longer term, decisions that affect the ways that we resource it, with time, technologies, energies and funds, must follow from this knowledge. Experiencing LipSync as an audience member has made me reflect that rather than taking pleasure in the effortlessness of singing it is important to make efforts to attend to the labour of breath. By doing this it is possible to be sensitive to the materialities that create the conditions in which surviving and flourishing are possible. Let us hope that the future is informed by knowledge that is already there in the embodied experience of those who live with disruptions to and constrictions of breath.

Notes

1 I am grateful for the feedback of the editors of this special issue in the development of this work.

2 Breath Cycle brought together musicians, physicians and educationalists to research the impact of classical singing on CF patients’ physical and mental well-being and musical development.