As anyone who heard her performing with Sounds of Progress will know, Claire Cunningham has a singing voice that soars to sweet and thrilling heights. Acting skills, too, evidenced again, in the music-theatre pieces she did with that ground-breaking group. But no-one, least of all Cunningham herself, would ever have predicted that her career would hit new, high-flying success as an aerialist.

For Cunningham's bones are brittle and easily fractured. She has relied on crutches to keep herself mobile since her teens. Yet all last year Cunningham chose to stretch herself physically, mentally and emotionally by embracing new disciplines that are generally regarded as the province of the super-fit. She worked all-out on learning movement techniques both on and off the ground, building not just strength and stamina but confidence. Confidence not solely as a performer, but as an individual, set on challenging the preconceptions of disability that had previously affected her artistic ambitions and training opportunities.

Typically - for Cunningham is no wuss when it comes to setting herself goals - she decided to road-test the expertise she'd been acquiring at home in Glasgow and elsewhere in the UK. So in August she headed off to Pittsburgh for an intensive six-week workshop with Bill Shannon, the celebrated breakdancer and skateboarder known worldwide as The Crutchmaster. Shannon, who was diagnosed with a degenerative hip condition at the age of seven, has evolved a resourcefully creative use of his crutches, making them an aid to some of the most spectacularly clever, fiendishly tricky dance moves on any scene.

Then, come November, she was in Berlin, and on-stage, dancing and airborne in Under the Radar, a quirky cabaret with a confrontational edge choreographed by American Jess Curtis for his Gravity performance group.

In March of this year Under the Radar will have its US premiere in San Francisco where Curtis is based, for some of the year at least. Thereafter the hope is that the show will travel, and, ideally, find a stage slot in Glasgow and on the Edinburgh Fringe.

For Cunningham to perform in Scotland would, in fact, be a thoroughly appropriate conclusion to this particular phase of her chosen learning curve because, as she points out, her course of action - the tailor-made training schedules, the travelling and the mentoring by Shannon - came about because of a Creative Scotland award.

"Being given that grant - £30,000 - really has dramatically changed my life," says Cunningham. "And that's not an exaggeration. I never could have predicted the directions I'm now going in, or the amazing people I'd meet and work with. So many doors have been opening . . . and I've been going through them. Travelling, learning, performing. And having a fabulous, scary, fascinating time.

"It's so beyond what I imagined when I applied for the award: the idea I put forward was about finding a performance style that used the abilities created by my disability - the upper body strength I have as a result of using crutches. To me that meant exploring aerial techniques, because, like with my crutches, I'd be bearing my weight on my arms. I thought I would concentrate on using equipment like ropes, slings or maybe trapeze. See if there were ways to make my crutches part of that equipment. Maybe devise a performance piece. And in the process, through Waterbaby - the company I've formed with my colleague Linda Payne - perhaps create movement training programmes for physically disabled individuals."

She breaks off, smiles and shakes her head, almost as if she still can't believe how that plan has expanded. Or the effect it has had on her, emotionally and physically.

Years of dispiriting hospital visits, of living with bones that couldn't support the tomboy spirit that made her keen to climb, clamber and risk falling had, she says, "meant I was someone who never paid attention to her body except to be aware of when a bone was fracturing . . .

who never expected to associate the word strong' with her legs or have muscles in those legs.

"And now? Now I can see, feel, the difference that the training programme has made, and the most obvious and exciting part, is that I've grown three centimetres. Me, a girl with osteoporosis, grows three centimetres at 29 years of age - it makes me wonder how many other people could benefit from working with dancers"

At the same time as she was building strength and stamina in dance classes, Cunningham was also working on her own in the studio, the privacy allowing her to experiment wildly with her crutches without fear of hitting anyone. That said, she hankered after an outside eye who could serve up relevant, practical advice.

She jokes about how good and useful things just seemed to happen. Weird coincidences, she says. Like Bill Shannon coming to Glasgow "and doing workshops at the end of my street - this one person who specialises in making movement with crutches and suddenly, he's there".

Those workshop encounters were enough to persuade her that one-to-one time with Shannon would push her in ways that other teachers and choreographers wouldn't - and she was right.

"He'd have me putting weight on my crutches at extreme angles. And I'd be saying I don't think so, no . . .' and Bill would be saying Put some weight on it this way' and encourage me to move my whole body around to get that new balance. He'd also say if something goes, let fall, go with it. My instinct, of course, is just the opposite. My right leg can fracture quite easily and an injury would have jeopardised the programme. But Bill understands how to fall. He has you thinking of ways you can work through a situation, use it, recover from it.

"You haven't failed if you fall, especially if you learn from it. When you put that mindset into practice, it really does build up your confidence. You start to think about having control of your body, your movement. I'd told him I wanted to work on pace, that I needed to get faster. Bill turned that around. He said to look at moving extremely slowly instead, at finding that control and the stamina to sustain it. It was, I tell you, absolutely draining. Five, ten minutes and I'd be flat out for half an hour. It was a total eye-opener, a revelation, a brilliant six weeks because it made me see all kinds of creative possibilities."

Meanwhile Jess Curtis, who she'd worked with before, making aerial pieces for an English dance company, Blue-Eyed Soul, had invited her to perform with his group, Gravity, in Berlin. Fringe-goers who frequented Aurora Nova in August 2002 will doubtless remember Fallen, his award-winning collaboration with Fabrik (Potsdam). It was a haunting, lyrical piece of dance-theatre and aerial choreography initially inspired by photographs of 9/11 victims falling from the Twin Towers.

Then as now, one of the things that interested Curtis was how we defined "beauty". What shaped our views on aesthetics? Influenced us to label some subjects or treatments as "acceptable" and others as "beyond the pale"? These concerns are a core element of his newest company piece, Under The Radar.

Cunningham, not long back from the show's successful premiere in Berlin, explains that although the ensemble includes two performers with disability - herself and Kaz Langley from London - it's not a show about disability, more an off-the-wall cabaret that uses acrobatics, dance and aerial work to explore the nature of skill and limitation.

One piece of publicity material asks "What differentiates a gift from a handicap? How do we define virtuosity? What do we consider normal?" For an audience, faced with a very disparate group of people, the trick - or indeed the challenge - is in keeping an open mind.

"There are moments of great beauty and humour in it," says Cunningham, "but also moments that really push the viewer to confront where they draw their own lines in terms of acceptance of difference and conformity."

Her own challenge in Under the Radar lay in how the work was made.

"We had a great deal of improvisation (which was new to me), discussion and exercises that required a great deal of emotional exposure and honesty. It was a bit frightening at times, it was such unknown territory for me, but incredibly satisfying in terms of my finding new ways of working.

"Now I'd love the show to come to Scotland. It would give me an opportunity to show what I've been able to achieve, so far, as a result of my Creative Scotland award.

But on a wider note, in terms of inclusive dance work, I think it would have a huge impact on audiences and on the Scottish dance community."

As Cunningham goes from strength to strength in ways she never envisaged, she's started thinking about making her own movement-based pieces. Does this mean she's turned her back on singing? Not a bit of it.

"I used to feel that all I could do was sing. And that made me want to be brave enough to jump into other areas. Now I can think of myself singing, moving, acting, hanging and flying - whatever allows me to communicate with an audience, tell a story or express myself and who I am."