Thinking Spaces: Lucy Rupert, Lisa Hirmer, Christina Kingsbury, and Ben Finley, “Interdisciplinary Improvisation & Ultrasonic Moth Songs”

This presentation will take place in person at ImprovLab, MCKN 108 at the University of Guelph. As always, our Thinking Spaces events are free!

To attend the talk, RSVP via our Google Forms.

More About this Workshop:

In August 2024, dancer Lucy Rupert, musician Ben Finley, as well as artists Christina Kingsbury and Lisa Hirmer, collaborated on the interdisciplinary performance Ultra-sonic Moth Songs. Audiences present that magical summer evening experienced improvised music and movement among the moths at the Moth Garden! Join us to watch some of the beautiful archival video of the event and talk about the process of creating this environmentally inspired, multi-disciplinary improvised performance.

More About the Presenters:

Lucy Rupert is a dancer, choreographer, art-science researcher, and writer. She has performed with Fujiwara Dance Inventions, Theatre Rusticle, Nova Dance, Anandam Dance, Sashar Zarif Dance, Puppetmongers Theatre, Circus Orange, and Chartier Danse, among others. In 2004 Lucy founded Blue Ceiling dance, an umbrella for her choreography and commissions, performing throughout Ontario, in New York, Montreal and Stuttgart, Germany. Her creations are inspired by cosmology, biology and philosophy – anything from monsters to photons to the end of the universe. Lucy has a Joint Honours BA in Dance and Music (University of Waterloo), an MA in History (University of Toronto), and currently studies philosophy through Oxford University. She lives in Toronto with her husband and son, and two feral cats, in a magical neighbourhood full of coyotes and old trees.

Lisa Hirmer is an interdisciplinary artist who works in visual media, especially photography; social practice; community collaboration, and sometimes writing. Her work is focussed on collective relationships both in human communities and in human relationships with the more-than-human world. A lot of her recent work wrestles with what it means to be living inside the climate emergency and on the edge of planetary collapse. Her work finds home both in traditional gallery contexts and an expanded field of other public and semi-public spaces and is always created with a keen awareness that multiple realities exist alongside one another.

She has shown her work across Canada and internationally including at Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Guelph, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Cambridge Art Galleries, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Tom Thomson Gallery, Art Windsor-Essex, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Peninsula Arts, CAFKA, Queens Museum, and Flux Factory, among others. She has done artist residencies with Arts House Melbourne, the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, KIAC and Camargo Foundation, and was the 2022 Waterfront Toronto Artist in Residence. She has received numerous grants including from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts and has a Master of Architecture from the University of Waterloo.

Christina Kingsbury’s (she/her) interdisciplinary art practice is inspired by histories of care and explores themes of place, ecology and inter-species relationships. Her work takes the form of performance, installation and social practice. Christina collaborates regularly with poets, ecologists, artists, choreographers and the public-including ecological public – to create relational works that offer a quiet and radical challenge to the commodification of life. Her work is rooted (often literally) in the Grand River watershed and treaty lands of the Mississauga’s of the Credit and part of her practice works through relationships with land as a settler person. Her solo and collaborative work has been shown as public interventions and in curated exhibitions both locally and internationally.

At the age of 14, Ben Finley plucked his first bass string. Everything changed! Immediately, things fell still, without worry, in playful possibility. Miraculously, that feeling remains. Ben Finley is a collaborative and solo performer-composer, singer, improviser, and writer grounded in creative acoustic and electric bass playing. He leads and co-leads several ensembles that cross compositional boundaries, drawing inspiration from chamber music, song forms, improvisational music making, electronics and the sound worlds of local environments. He grew up on a music festival farm (Westben) where he witnessed many ways of making music, entwined with land and creatures. Ben is the co-founder and creative director of the Westben Centre for Connection & Creativity’s Performer-Composer Residency, which since 2018 has welcomed many diverse sound explorers to collaborate, share creative music and exchange perspectives. He is also Westben’s Sustainability Coordinator, working on various environmental care initiatives on the Westben grounds. He is a current Ph.D. candidate in the Critical Studies in Improvisation program at the University of Guelph, studying music festivals and creative music practices as sites of eco-cultural regeneration. Please find more about Ben’s projects at benfinleymusic.com.