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ImprovNotes is a monthly newsletter distributed by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation.

Live Events

 
White text on a black background reads OPEN EARS. The text is placed in rectangular white boxes which are placed on top of each other. The boxes are offset, forming corners in the upper right and lower left of the image from which waves reminiscent of a wifi symbol radiate outwards.

Open Ears
June 1–4, 2023
Various venues
Kitchener, ON
Various prices, FREE / $25 per event
$150 for Festival Pass

Open Ears is celebrating its 25th year (and 23rd festival presentation) with a characteristically interesting bill of experimental art and music. Featuring film, dance, installation art, a 25th-anniversary celebration, workshops, lectures, and (of course) music, Open Ears 23 has something for all fans of the avant-garde.

There’s a lot happening in these four short days: Melody McKiver will perform a solo viola set, Yvonne Ng will lead a dance workshop, University of Guelph IMPR student Joe Sorbara will perform with the Counterstasis Trio and special guest Kathryn Ladano. . . this is really just the tip of the iceberg, so take a look at the program. Quite a few events are free, including (impressively) the workshops. So, if you’ve wanted to soak up some free instruction/collaboration in improv dance or music making, Open Ears has you covered.

The events which aren’t free cost $25 (except an installation in a museum, which is included in the museum’s general admission price). I’d say Open Ears has pretty decent pricing, with plenty of free event leeway for those with limited disposable income! If you anticipate attending all or most of the paid events, you can get festival passes here for $150.

Fuchsia letters on a black background read SUONI PER IL POPOLO 2023. The image's rectangular border is made up of various overlapping black and white tarot cards.

Suoni Per il Popolo
June 1–25, 2023
Casa del Popolo / La Sala Rossa / La Sotterenea / Some Additional Venues
Montreal, QC
Various prices, FREE–$45 CAD

I reckon June is the biggest month for experimental music festivals in Canada. I’m not 100% sure of that, so you can’t get mad at me if I’m wrong, but it definitely feels like they always show up thick and fast in June—you’re going to have so many options, and they’re all quite solid.

Suoni Per il Popolo has been at it for a good long while now, and they aren’t running out of steam. You’ll be able to catch some past IN artists of the month here, like Maria Chavez and Matana Roberts. A few artists will be doing multi-day residencies within the festival (i.e., Gambletron and Johnny Forever, which I can strongly recommend). You’ll have a bunch of big names coming through, like Sun Ra Arkestra, White People Killed Them (featuring Pulitzer Prize-winner Raven Chacon alongside John Dieterich and Marshal Trammel), and tons more. It’s a really big lineup, so to get the full sense of what you can expect to see, it’s best to head over to the excellent Suoni 2023 website.

Like Open Ears and TONE Festival below, this is a solid example of a very reasonably priced festival. A bunch of shows and exhibitions are free, and the other events are also pretty inexpensive, especially if you buy advance tickets!

A red sepia-toned picture of a cloudy sky. Grey lettering in a wavy font says TONE, and to the left of this are the dates 2-28 June 2023.
 
TONE Festival
June 2–28, 2023
Various Venues
Toronto, ON
Various prices, $12–$40 CAD

TONE Festival is back, and they have another characteristically great lineup on offer. Between June 2 and 28, you’ll be able to catch shows by Sun Ra Arkestra, White People Killed Them (featuring Pulitzer Prize-winner Raven Chacon alongside John Dieterich and Marshal Trammel, as I mentioned earlier), Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog (this is a trio of Ribot, Ches Smith & Shahzad Ismaily, and not an actual ceramic dog), Zoh Amba and Chris Corsano, Badge Époque Ensemble, Farida Amidou, meimei, RAWL, Caroline Davis’ Alula, and many more.

Between Suoni and TONE, a lot of the same touring acts are covered, so if you can’t make it from Toronto to Montreal (or vice versa), you’re all set regardless!

To see the full lineup, head on over to the TONE website. You can purchase advance tickets on a per-show basis there. These shows are extremely reasonably priced—the most expensive is $40, and a few are $12–15. Hard to beat that for the calibre of performers on offer here!

Stylized blue and dark blue lettering on a white background reads Vision Arts for Art 2023 Improvising the Future.
Vision Festival
June 10, 12–18, 2023
New York, NY
Various venues
Various prices, $12.51 USD – $802.15 USD

Arts for Art’s Vision Fest returns with another set of hybrid shows and the lineup is, once again, quite good. You’ll get to see a lot of Joëlle Léandre (she will be receiving a lifetime achievement award, and the first day of programming will see her playing with Tiger Trio, Fred Moten, Judson Trio, and the Joëlle Léandre Septet). You’ll get to see William Parker, Zeena Parkins, and Ava Mendoza in various ensembles, Gerald Cleaver’s Black Host, a six-piece tribute to Alice Coltrane led by Hamid Drake, and much more. There’s also a film festival component, visual art exhibits, and the Arts for Art & Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies conference on the Legacies of Black Creative Arts / Spirit of the Ancestors. All told, it’s a huge program, making for a very packed several days.

This is one of the more expensive events you’ll see listed in this newsletter, but given the quality of the bill, I can at least recommend the livestreams or livestream pass as accessible options. For those who’ll be watching via livestream, tickets start at a relatively modest $15, with the full festival pass running at $75. For those able to attend in person, tickets for each day of the festival start at $49.87, with the full pass running at $375.32. If you wish to be very important, the pass that certifies you as such will set you back $802.15. Keep in mind that these prices are all in USD.

For a comprehensive overview of the very impressive lineup and to order tickets, check out the Vision Festival website.

Call for Proposals

 
two sticky notes where a long table has been drawn. Each sticky note shows only half the table, but when put side by side, the full table is revealed.
 
What Does Improvising Mean for You?
In-Person Conference
Middlesex University, Hendon Campus
June 22, 2023
Proposal Deadline: May 31
 
Arts and Creative Industries (ACI) is inviting colleagues and postgraduate researchers, from across all faculties of Middlesex University and beyond, to gather for an interactive, fully participatory event, responding to the question: What does improvising mean for you? 

The faculty of Arts and Creative Industries (ACI) have been considering the improvisatory (encountered through their performance, artmaking, and practice-led research) for many years, not least through the faculty’s Transdisciplinary Improvisation Network (TIN) research cluster and former events such as New Pathways in Improvisation and collaboration with the Global Improvisation Initiative (GII). And yet, they recognize that improvisation is applied in many other professional, pedagogical, and personal settings in transformative and innovating ways.  
 
The aim of this event is to set up an exchange where we can begin to understand what value improvisation has across all creative, professional, and daily practices. ACI is interested in considering how improvising is explored, described, and applied; how its pasts and futures might re-define social and political encounters:
  • What does improvising mean to you, in your life, thinking and practice, pedagogically, and philosophically?
  • What are the risks involved with improvising? 
  • How do we rebalance the "learned" and the habitual with a sense of "unlearning" or "relearning"? What role does "knowing" and "not knowing" play when improvising? 
  • What is the value of improvising as/for social change? 
The event follows a "long table" format which facilitates multiple types of engagement, and in which everybody becomes a contributor to the event, such that multiple voices can be heard in playfully structured ways.  

ACI invites you to propose creative provocations in the form of short talks, performances, video/audio works, and facilitated/interactive improvisation practices (i.e., guided scores, tasks, and the like)—these contributions will act as counterpoints throughout the day. 

When making proposals to share your work, note that while there will be opportunity for you to screen image/video, ACI is prioritizing dialogue, practice, and action over PowerPoint, as well as shorter, rather than longer talks. 

You are invited to participate by sending a short (100-word) expression of interest/proposal by May 31st to: r.vesty@mdx.ac.uk. 
 
Expressions of interest should include: 
 
Name of presenter(s) and subject area 
Email 
Title 
Brief description (100 words) 

Indication of the duration and nature of your contribution (i.e. 10 minute talk with images, 20 minute interactive/guided improvisation) and any technical requirements.
 
All presenters and participants, save the date and register via Eventbrite.

Job Opportunity

 
Text on a white background reads Guelph Jazz Festival. Guelph is in black bold font, Jazz is in red bold font, and below these, Festival is in a light black font.

Guelph Jazz Festival Summer Jobs
Application Deadline: May 26

The Guelph Jazz Festival is currently hiring for two eight-week positions through the Canada Summer Jobs Program.

The festival is seeking one Marketing Assistant and one Production Assistant. Both positions pay $16/hour from late June to late August. The exact schedules for both positions are to be determined, but flexible hours are available.

The Marketing Assistant will assist the Artistic and General Director, as well as other GJF staff, with marketing, promotion, communication, and related tasks relevant to the 2023 Guelph Jazz Festival (14–17 September), as well as assisting with other admin tasks as needed. For a full description of the position, see the job posting.

The Production Assistant will assist the Artistic and General Director, as well as other GJF staff, with logistical and operational tasks related to bringing artists to the 2023 Guelph Jazz Festival. They will also assist with other admin tasks. For full details of the position, see the job posting.

Note: as these positions are offered through the Canada Summer Jobs Program, applicants must be no older than 30 years of age at the time the position begins. For any questions about employment with the Guelph Jazz Festival, email info@guelphjazzfestival.com!

Vocal River Workshop

 

A picture of a woman with white hair smiling at the camera. She has blue eyes and is wearing a paisley tank top.


A Vocal River Workshop with Rhiannon
October 18–20, 2023
The Arboretum
Guelph, Ontario
$500 USD

Join renowned vocal artist Rhiannon for a non-residential three-day Vocal River Workshop in the beautiful Arboretum, located at the University of Guelph. This workshop is designed for singers and teachers with good pitch and the desire to study vocal improvisation, circle singing, and song form. Participants will sing together to find their unique and personal sound, working alone, in pairs, and in ensemble collaborations using the pleasure of physical movement, while combining intuition and invention with skill and heart.  

Using Rhiannon’s Vocal River exercises, singers deepen their improvisational vocabulary, study melody, harmony, rhythm, and tone, and then circle up and sing. Rhiannon has built her process for teaching vocal improvisation on the idea that we must be solid in musical skills, develop intuition, and be available to the mystery and grace that exist when creating music spontaneously. Believing that improvisation belongs in personal creativity as well as performance, she has developed a process to make improvisation an essential piece of a singer's training. These exercises unfold in a carefully articulated progression.

Working in circle, students first improvise melody, harmony, rhythm, counterpoint, and interlocking parts in solo and small ensemble games. Then in learning to improvise as an ensemble, with exercises using the natural connection of body and voice, participants will learn to reveal a vulnerable, authentic sound. The group will also practice using language, both invented and in their native tongue, sung and spoken, as part of their musical repertoire. Many of these games become strong performance pieces and teach you how to invent a group sound without a leader. Learning to improvise as an ensemble with shared responsibility and power teaches deep listening, generosity, courage, and musical awareness.

You can sign up for this one-of-a-kind workshop via Rhiannon’s website. Limited spaces are available!

About Rhiannon: Rhiannon is a vocal artist with a vision of music as a vehicle for innovation, healing, transformation, and social change. A vibrant, gifted singer, performance artist, composer, and master teacher, Rhiannon has been bringing her unique and potent blend of jazz, world music, improvisation and storytelling to audiences for over four decades.

Letters to My
Original Geography

 
Hands are touching objects on a table in a dimly lit room.
 
Dear Guelph, 

Letting rip her trucker’s belly laugh, Claire Filmon said straight up this afternoon, “Oh, the only thing I do now is improvisation,” and she followed quickly with, “I offer it to the world.”  

Yes, she does. 
 
Dance has always been her north pole. After traditional dance-world work with companies and choreographers, like many (Anna Halprin in particular) she found her breath in improvisation. Working with Mark Tompkins, David Zambrano, and Julyen Hamilton, she realized that it could be a performance in and of itself, and that she was good at it. Yet after the oh so expected knives in the back that men throw when they feel threatened, she moved to working with women and said that it was more rounded (isn’t that nice?). Her collaborations widened to Simone Forti, Nancy Starck Smith, and Lisa Nelson. 
 
She uses the term improvisation, but she better says “composition in real time”. She prefers this nomenclature to instant composition. Her teaching, which she does all over the place, mixes “composition in real time” with Contact Impro (CI), because she thinks the two worlds have difficulty meeting. There is joy when someone from CI lets go into the moment, or when touching becomes an element of composing in real time. 
 
Simone Forti instilled in Claire that cells talk to cells—you move people from the inside. Claire once did a 10-minute impro with a group of musicians for an audience of three thousand. The two front rows of the audience were occupied by people in wheelchairs. Claire worried that gallivanting around on stage would be an affront to these people who in her mind could not move. . . but all to the contrary. One of them grabbed her hand as she came off stage and thanked her, “Thanks to you, I moved like I have never moved before.”

What does she love to do? She loves to bring dancers from CI together with dancers who practice real time composition, and she loves making duos with lighting designers. She understands that her practice of improvisation is dangerous to the status quo, and that’s where it is most valuable. Claire is riddled with generosity and knows how precious this art is. Invite her quickly, she has so much so much so much to give.
 
* * *
 
Catharine Cary is a pluridisciplinary artist, born in New York City, now vagabonding into her 44th country/parallel. Trained as an economist and diplomat, she threw over running big bad urban development projects in NYC to paint in Paris. Paint became dance, dance became performance, performance became improvisation, improvisation, well, her life. She practices it, she performs it, she writes about it, and she hopes that she is it.

Artist of the Month: 
Roderick Usher

 
A black ink drawing of a figure with long dark hair and a miserable facial expression, sitting in profile and seen from their left. The figure sits at the right side of the frame and looks into empty white space, with a white curtain hanging in the background. The figure is wearing fancy clothes, in a robe fastened by a ribbon, billowing pants, and a frills at the wrists of their shirt sleeves. The image is by Aubrey Beardsley, drawn to accompany Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher."
 
Roderick Usher was many things: a severe hypochondriac; a weird, obsessive twin to his sickly sister; the last of the Usher line; and the resident of an uncannily lively house. These sensational aspects of Usher have overshadowed his talent as a guitar improviser. His virtuosity was documented in an account of his last days by an old friend of his, who serialized his concert review in a gentleman’s magazine in the 1830s.

Sadly, Usher died relatively young—though by the way his friend described him, you wouldn’t have known it to look at him—by the hands of his twin sister. He had mistakenly buried her alive at what he perceived to be the end of her long illness, and then she forced her way out of the dungeon and sort of, like… fell on him, I guess, causing him to die of fright or something. This peculiar incident coincided with their whole danged house suffering a catastrophic structural failure and falling into a nearby lake.

So it was that Roderick Usher gave up the ghost, but thankfully, he didn’t do so before feverishly scribbling out the blueprint for the subsequent two centuries (and counting) of “weird little guitar improv guys”. Since they didn’t have recording devices in the 1830s, we don’t know precisely what his improv sounded like, but we do have the literary descriptions provided. They basically add up to, “It was pretty ‘out there’.” Visionary work, to be sure. Sounds like Usher was well ahead of his time.

Quote of the Month
 

The ruins of a stone mansion sinking into a foggy, swampy lake, surrounded by dead trees and with a pillar in the foreground with a sculpture of a bird of prey on top of it. The image is a still from The Fall of the House of Usher (1960, directed by Roger Corman).

“I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom…. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber.”

– Roderick Usher’s friend, describing the concentrated “bad vibes” of the late guitarist’s improv sets. I wish Usher hadn’t died before Bandcamp existed, but them’s the breaks. Major thanks to Edgar Allen Poe for preserving these quotes in The Fall of the House of Usher.
 

Upcoming Events & Notable Dates
 

June 1: Deadline for Sound, Meaning, Education: CONVERSATIONS & improvisations
June 12: asuperher00pera, ImprovLab
July 15–21: Claire Filmon and Stephane Els: Workshop Contact Impro and Composition in Real Time
October 2–4WHAT IIIF? Research Festival in Rotterdam

About IICSI

The International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) is a partnered research institute, funded through a SSHRC partnership grant, that investigates how improvisation can improve life. IICSI’s mandate is to create positive social change through innovative scholarship, impactful arts events, and community-oriented activities. Our Institute works with scholars, students, creative practitioners, and community partners to practice and study improvisation as a model for social change. This research has resulted in the development of new technologies for making sound; large-scale celebratory community gatherings; numerous publications, including hundreds of articles published through our Institute’s peer-reviewed journalworkshops for youthartist talks; and academic conferences. IICSI also supports graduate programs in Critical Studies in Improvisation offered through the University of Guelph. 

The project team for the Institute includes 75+ researchers and 65+ community partners around the globe, as well as several Student Research Assistants and core staff members. The Institute has key sites at University of Guelph, McGill University, Memorial University, University of Regina, Carleton University, the University of British Columbia, Queen’s University Belfast (N. Ireland), and 17, Institute of Critical Studies (Mexico). 

 

About ImprovNotes


ImprovNotes is written by Chris Worden and is edited and assembled by Communications and Research Assistant Julia Busatto. If you have anything improvisation related that you would like included in the newsletter, please email ahadmin@uoguelph.ca.
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IICSI · MacKinnon 042 · University of Guelph · Guelph, ON N1G 2W1 · Canada

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