Improvisation is the primary means for performers to express their individuality and be creative in a performance, and has immense potential to expand inclusion and diversity across the arts. Offering new directions for contemporary performing artists of every stripe, it is also central to the practices and interests of arts therapists and psychologists. Concurrent brings practitioners and researchers together to share ideas and ways of working, and to map the psychological means by which improvisers and audiences exchange or construct meanings at the forefront of music, dance, visual art and arts therapies.

Performances will include live dance and video performance installation; interdisciplinary and choreographic responses to children’s and carers’ stories who have had ongoing health problems; musicians and visual artists using an innovative realtime dynamic score system to improvise collectively; interdisciplinary ensembles improvising to a sculptural score based on a new psychological model of improvisers’ choices to shape improvisation. Discussions and workshops will explore unconventional facets of improvisation in theory and practice across a wide range of fields; shared and distinctive uses of improvisation in different arts therapies for different groups; and an analysis of how participants in singing and dancing workshops perceive both barriers to improvisation, and opportunities afforded through improvising.

Booking information and times will follow later in the year, but to get an idea of what to expect, take a look at videos from Concurrent#1 at Edinburgh College of Art in January 2016:www.concurrent.music.ed.ac.uk/media
Or come along to Concurrent#2 on 13th & 14th January at the Reid Concert hall, Edinburgh:www.concurrent.music.ed.ac.uk/events/concurrent2-new-configurations-for-improvising/

Edge Hill University site: www.edgehill.ac.uk/events/0000/00/00/concurrent-3-exchanges-improvisation/

http://www.concurrent.music.ed.ac.uk/events/concurrent-3-exchanges-through-improvisation/