Improvising Dancers Community Engagement & Partnerships

Our partners represent many of the most vital participants in the cultivation and perpetuation of communities of arts and creative improvised music in Canada. Our partnerships include collaboration in the hosting of colloquia, the media dissemination of vital outputs from project research, and the promotion of research on improvisation well beyond its traditional existing constituencies. Collaboration and consultation, in all these relationships, are core first principles of our method: they are reflected in our commitment to (and history of) working closely with our partner organizations to design research activities, to implement  projects, and to present our findings (at conferences, etc). The benefits of such partnerships are many: they serve to break down silos, to bridge gaps, and to enable different kinds of organizations to come together, to engage in a productive process of co-creative knowledge-exchange.

Such partnerships play a key role in broadening and diversifying the methodological and disciplinary expertise of our research team, and in enabling us to see beyond the assumptions and perspectives associated with our home disciplines. Our community partners similarly gain a great deal from our collaborative work: they learn new ways to approach old problems; they draw on the resources and expertise of a formerly, and conventionally, inaccessible group of theorists and practitioners; and they can offer clients new programming and services that complement existing portfolios.