Breathwork in VestAndPage Performance Practice

This article examines the methodological and theoretical foundations of Creative Dynamic Breathing (CDB), a performance-based breathwork practice developed by the artist duo VestAndPage (Andrea Pagnes and Verena Stenke). It contextualises its application within academic and non-institutional settings.Drawing from transpersonal psychology, ancient Eastern philosophical traditions, contemporary neuroscience, and the history of medicine, their research positions breath as both a physiological necessity and a cognitive-affective performative force. Breath is regarded as a dynamic threshold between body and consciousness, matter and memory, biology and poetics.CDB emerges from Pagnes’ personal experience with Transpersonal Rebirthing (TR) and its lineage in the therapeutic work of Grof, Lake, and Orr, integrated with yogic and Taoist techniques such as Pranayama and Tummo. The method supports access to non-ordinary states of consciousness to explore memory, trauma, creativity, and identity dissolution. Practiced in natural or immersive environments with soundscapes, CDB sessions invite participants to engage in extended diaphragmatic breathing cycles that induce visions, emotional releases, and heightened introspection. These experiences are later translated into performance gestures and poetic texts, fostering embodied knowledge production and creative re-enactment.By analysing how CDB has been applied within VestAndPage’s workshops and performances – particularly during their exploration of tuberculosis, medical isolation, and the body as a microbiome – the article interrogates breath as both a site of vulnerability and resistance. Breathing becomes a transformative mechanism for processing illness and fears through memory. Bridging somatic practices, altered states of consciousness, and performance art reveals breath as a living epistemology – a medium through which the performer can access inner truths nourishing the body through breathing, eventually forging new forms of expression that negotiate the porous boundary between life and art

Consciousness · Embodied cognition · Gesture · Performative utterance · Performing arts · Transformative learning · Transpersonal · Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Research · Spaceflight effects on biology

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