Thinking Spaces

https://vimeo.com/790578811 Thinking Spaces: The Improvisation Reading Group and Speaker Series is pleased to present “Chance as Co-Director: Working with the Whims of Children,” a talk by Darren O’Donnell. This event will take place on Wednesday, January 18 at 10am (ET), online (via Zoom). A moderated Q&A will follow the talk. If you are interested in…

Improvisation is a core element of some interventions in the emerging fields of dance for health and dance therapy, which have shown potential to slow progress or diminish symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alheimer's.

The purpose of this talk is to invite partnership and mutual sharing in Critical Studies in Improvisation to imagine uses and expansion in plantation societies.  Using art to confront complicated social issues is a long accepted and well received practice in plantation societies.

Thinking Spaces, “Improvisation, Pedagogy and Pre-Texts” is presented by Sophie Brown, and takes place Wednesday, September 13 at 4pm ET. The talk includes a presentation followed by a guided Q&A and conversation period. 

Sophie's talk is based on her recently published chapter about Pre-Texts, and offers an overview of the method for integrating civics, innovation, and literacy in the classroom. It draws on the experience of Lindsay Bobyak and Sophie Brown in using Pre-Texts with elementary students as part of Creative Roots Collective, which provides educational opportunities in rural Colorado.

As the music unfolds, composition and improvisation seem to flow together into a dream-like continuum where jazz and new music meet. To reach this place, Delbecq and Houle have worked for years extending the techniques of their instruments and creating their own language of musical gestures for purposes of spontaneous musical composition.

For our fourth Thinking Spaces session, we are excited to welcome Dr. Karamjeet Dhillon. Join us on Monday October 2 2023, 2:00PM-3:30PM to listen to this award-winning scholar discuss and share ideas about the nature of lived experience, sensory ethnography, and post-intentionality phenomenology. This talk takes place in-person in ImprovLab, University of Guelph. Registration is required to attend. Sign up now!

In the wake of BLM, MeToo, the COVID-19 pandemic, and changing audience and creator dynamics, the Shakespeare Industry (arts organizations and academic institutions alike) has finally realized that Shakespeare wasn’t just a basic white guy; “Shakespeare” can be – indeed, *is* – Black, trans, Indigenous, gender queer, disabled. While historians like Sawyer Kemp, Andy Kesson, Ayanna Thompson, and more work to uncover the previously invisible histories of Shakespeare’s own queer and coloured worlds, artists like Emma Frankland, Dawn Jani Birley, Reneltta Arluk, Nataki Garrett, and more are devising creation room practices that not only permit, but *rely upon*, the whole selves of equity-deserving artists previously excluded from Shakespearean spaces to shape the worlds of rehearsal and the plays in performance.