Emergence
Composer & Project Lead · 2026
And, What Do You Do? was a three-strand interdisciplinary project developed across dance, acting and text, and music technology. Each strand began from a shared visual stimulus, but developed through a different encounter, allowing another practice, person or process to shape what emerged before substantial musical decisions were fixed.
Emergence developed through the Dance strand, in collaboration with choreographer Christie Barnes and 11 dancers from NDA Adult Dance Company. Their responses to the stimulus became the starting point for my compositional process, shifting my attention from the outward shape of movement towards intention, effort, restriction, relationship and the conditions that produced it.
Emergence (short version)
Behind the scenes
I developed the Dance strand with choreographer Christie Barnes and 11 dancers from NDA Adult Dance Company. We began from a shared visual stimulus, using the dancers’ responses to it as the first source of information rather than beginning with predetermined musical material.
Christie used the image to generate movement with the dancers, while I observed how different interpretations emerged through space, effort, relationship and intention. Those responses became the first material I could begin to think about compositionally.
Stimulus
Stimulus: Photo of hand reaching in dark room - caught in reflection of mirror.
What the dancers revealed
What interested me was the range of interpretations that could emerge from the same image. Through Christie’s activities and the dancers’ exploration, ideas around freedom, confinement, relationship and intention began to take physical form. Their responses gave me access to qualities of weight, effort and transition that I could not have arrived at simply by looking at the stimulus myself.
Confinement to freedom in sequence.
Condition to composition
As the process developed, my attention shifted from the outward shape of movement towards the intention and conditions behind it. This changed how I thought about translation between disciplines. Rather than assigning a direct musical equivalent to something I could see, I became interested in carrying a principle from one practice into another.
Pitch system I created based on "The Box" .
The Box exercise became a useful example.
The dancers explored confinement through an imagined restricted space; I transferred that underlying condition of restriction into the clarinet, deliberately limiting the material available to the instrument.
The constraint produced its own consequences in register, breath, attack, timbre and physical effort.
A further shift happened when I began improvising live on flute while the dancers moved. Until this point, much of the process had involved observing their work and responding to it afterwards. Playing together introduced a more immediate exchange. I found myself responding to qualities of movement in real time, changes in weight, direction, intensity and timing, while the dancers also began responding to the sound I was producing.
The relationship became reciprocal: information was no longer moving simply from dance into composition, but between movement and music.This changed my understanding of collaboration within the strand. The music did not need to arrive as a response after the choreographic work was complete; both practices could remain open enough to affect one another while they were still developing.
Reciprocity
Improvising on flute with the dancers.
What changed
By the time I began shaping the final composition, the dancers had already changed the information available to me. Their embodied knowledge had introduced ways of thinking about intention, effort, restriction, relationship and transition that had become part of my compositional process.
The resulting music emerged through observation, experimentation and response. I remained responsible for the musical decisions, but the conditions from which those decisions were made had been transformed by the collaboration.