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Oral Histories

Saxophonist Matana Roberts in conversation with ICASP Researcher Eric Lewis.

Oral Histories is a showcase of interviews, performances, and articles by and about improvising musicians, artists, writers and scholars. This new monthly feature offers an intimate look inside the minds and practices of some of the many dynamic, innovative people whose energy and ideas make improvisation studies such a vibrant field of inquiry. The Oral Histories project provides a space for improvising artists to be heard in their own words, often in dialogue with other improvisers, scholars and practitioners.

Letters of Introduction: Film Credits and Cityscapes

A talk by Will Straw, a professor with the Department of Art History and Communications Studies, McGill University.
Florence Partridge Room
3rd Floor, McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph
Presented by the School of Languages and Literature and the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice research project.

Thinking Spaces - November 6, 2015

This session of Thinking Spaces: The Improvisation Reading Group and Speaker Series session is titled Change of the Century: How Ornette Coleman Transformed Improvised Music. The session will present David Lee. He is the author of The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field. Taking Coleman's critically important 1959 engagement at the NY Five Spot as a point of departure, we will be examining the wider implications of his innovations on post-1950s improvised music.

Thinking Spaces - Friday October 23rd, 2015

Please join us for an afternoon with composer, musician, visual artist, craftsman, inventor, and educator Douglas R. Ewart. Mr. Ewart will talk about his transdisciplinary project Crepuscule, which he has expanded globally during the past decade. He will also discuss his intermedia work such as the sound installation Rio Negro. He will facilitate a communal improvisation with the audience. Please feel free to bring your instruments.

When: Oct 23rd, 2015, 3:00-6:00 pm
Where: Silence (46 Essex St.), Guelph

This event is FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!

For questions: hkisiedu@uoguelph.ca

Think Pieces 7, Now Available!

The Think Pieces project will explore the boundaries and borders of critical improvisation research as it engages with the social, political, and cultural issues that affect the lived lives of individuals around the globe. By bringing together the divergent voices of engaged writers and thinkers to ponder how improvisation provides novel insight into a deluge of problems, the Think Pieces project will offer a provocation to its readers: as improvisers/through improvisation, how and why do we think; how and why do we act?

Upcoming Colloquium: Improvisation, Collective Action, and the Arts of Activism

Montreal, Quebec, July 9-11, 2015

UBC Colloquium 2015 - Launching Tomorrow!!

The 2015 UBC IICSI Colloquium, in partnership with Coastal Jazz launches tomorrow!

Open Call for Applications - Koumaria Residency

Koumaria 2015 Open Call
By artist collective Medea Electronique

Deadline to apply: July 1st 2015

Residency Runs from: SEPTEMBER 18th 2015 to SEMPTEMBER 30th 2015

Residency Theme: Remote Site-specific acoustic improvisations: A Recording Project

Residency

Call for Applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow in Aboriginal Health

Please click here to download a PDF call for applications.

The Indigenous Peoples’ Health Research Centre (IPHRC) is seeking applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow to work on a multi-institutional, research project titled “Acting Out! But in a Good Way.” IPHRC past Postdoctoral Fellows have been successful in going on to secure employment in Canadian and U.S. universities and in health organizations.

Between the Ears: June 19-21, Kitchener-Waterloo

Sly and his Family Stone exhorted us to "dance to the music" as if it were possible not to, but our bodies know better. Intrinsically linked, sound and dance are waves moving through space and time and occasionally bumping into things.

Between the Ears 2015 is about these travels - we'll float our sounds on canoes through the lake at Victoria Park and origami boats in the Civic Square fountain and hear them in a dreamworld collage of coincident busking, and we'll see sound traced in wondrous choreographies from our most creative minds, performed by our amazing artists.

Listening itself, an improvisative act engaged in by everyone, announces a practice of active engagement with the world, where we sift, interpret, store and forget, in parallel with action and fundamentally articulated with it ("Mobilitas Animi" 113).

– George E. Lewis