MMaP Gallery, St. John’s Arts & Culture Centre

This day-long symposium will feature presentations by researchers and music festival programmers from across Newfoundland to explore the potential of arts festivals to promote social change. Dr. Ajay Heble will deliver the keynote address, “Curating for Change: Festivals, Improvisation, and the Staging of Diversity.” His talk will question how, as arts presenters and festival curators, we might best play a role in encouraging what George Lewis has called an “inter-culturalizing” of the field—a broadening of the range and scope of cultural references that the field takes on. He will draw on his work and experience as the founding Artistic Director of The Guelph Jazz Festival to explore how the curation and presentation of improvised music in a festival setting may provide a modest, but perhaps also a profound, role in enabling generative new forms of community-making, critical thinking, and social practice, and to consider how the act and practice of staging diversity is one vital way festival presenters can curate for social change.

Dr. Heble’s keynote talk is a public event and will also be live-streamed through Music at Memorial at 1pm on Friday April 28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFk50jxJxkY

Visit the MUN Workshops and Colloquium section of our website for details and the full-schedule