2024 IICSI Research Studio Session Schedule
The 2024 IICSI Research Studio Session took place on Friday, April 12, at ImprovLab. The session began with a keynote presentation by Dr. Rashida Braggs, “Amber in the City of Light,” and continued with a full day of research programming.
More About the Research Studio Session:
The idea is to encourage grad students in the IMPR program and students/researchers working as research assistants with IICSI to present short (3-5 minute) descriptions of their improvisation-related research or work at an end-of-semester gathering of other students, as well as IICSI team members, staff, and invited guests.
Inspired, in part, by the “Three-Minute Thesis” competition for grad students, we hope that participants will respond to the challenge to present their work and its wider impact and implications in plain language in five minutes or less.
More About The Keynote Presentation:
Dr. Rashida K. Braggs screened and discussed Amber in the City of Light, a solo multimedia performance that shares and re-envisions the experiences of Black African diasporic women jazz artists who have migrated to Paris, France. Culling original interviews, field notes and archival research, Dr. Rashida K. Braggs enacts multiple narratives through an embodied performance that merges original song, dance, poetry and theatre.
More About The Presenter:
Dr. Rashida K. Braggs is a scholar-performer who acts, dances, sings, composes music and performs spoken word. Jacob’s Pillow, Williams College Museum of Art, the Tapir Art Gallery and the United Solo Theatre Festival have featured her performances. She is also a Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts), a Fulbright Global Scholar, and a co-recipient of a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship. The author of Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music and Migration in Post-World War II Paris, Rashida has also published in such journals as the Nottingham French Studies, the Journal of Popular Music Studies and The Black Scholar.
Schedule of Events:
9:00 KEYNOTE: Rashida K Braggs (Africana Studies, Williams College, USA), “Amber in the City of Light”
10:00 – 10:30 BREAK
10:30 Nick Fraser, “Smooth Operations: Composing Music for (Free?) Improvisers”
10:45 Rachelle Myrie, “‘The Spirit of the Thing’: Music, Improvisation, and Human Flourishing in African, Caribbean, and Black Communities”
11:00 Taylor Graham (School of English and Theatre Studies, University of Guelph), “The Blyth Festival Theatre and the Imagined Community of Rural Canada”
11:15 Matthew Endahl, “Holding Space for/in Ensemble Creativity”
11:30 Kathryn Cobbler, “Growing Intimate Conversations: Examining the Performer-Composer Connection of Music Improvisation”
11:45 Jordan Zalis (Ethnomusicology, Memorial University of Newfoundland), “Clouds of Probability: Improvisation as Effectuality in Spectacular Sports Theatre”
12:00 noon – 1:00 lunch
1:00 Aimée Dawn Robinson, “Full Circle”
1:15 Michael Bergmann, Improvnetics: Post-anthropocentric performance and improvisational modes for human-AI play, or: What we talk about when we talk about Intersentient empathy”
1:30 Mike Hansen, “When Does Noise Become A Sound?: Redefining Through Participatory Sound Art Practices”
1:45 Sofia Boz (Pedagogical, Educational and Instructional Sciences, University of Padua, Italy), “Jazz’n School”
2:00 Bob Wiseman, “The Black Box”
2:15 Brent Rowan, “Critical Hardware, Software, and Infrastructure Considerations for Telematic Musicking”
2:30 annais linares, “Arts-Based Kin Making: Co-creative Multispecies Accompaniment”
