Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium 2025: “Dance with the Music: Movement in the Improvised Arts”

The 2025 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium will take place in the ImprovLab at the University of Guelph from September 11-13, 2025. Presented by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) and curated by its Director, Dr. Eric Fillion, this year’s colloquium is titled “Dance with the Music: Movement in the Improvised Arts.”

Focused on the interplay of improvised music and dance, this edition of the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium provides attendees with a great opportunity to engage with world-class academics, dancers, and musicians from Canada and the US, including Heather Cornell, Patricia Nicholson, Julie Richard, and many more. Discussions, performances, artist interventions, and films will all be showcased in IICSI’s state-of-the-art ImprovLab research and performance space.

The colloquium program will also highlight two special sessions by US-based artists Ravish Momin, Val Jeanty, and Ivvy, as part of their week-long residency at the ImprovLab, which will culminate with a performance at the Guelph Jazz Festival. The first of these sessions, by Momin and Jeanty, will feature a discussion and examples of their unique take on global music, an approach that is characterized by the notable absence of traditional instruments and a vision of cultures as dynamic and continuously adaptive. A two-part session, it will address both Haitian culture and Mumbai street bands. The second session will see Ivvy speaking about the aesthetics of FlexDance, demonstrating this artform’s interdependence with music while reflecting on the communities that developed around it as an outgrowth of Black urban/working class culture in Brooklyn.

This catered event is free and open to all, with RSVP via Eventbrite.