Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium 2023

ImprovLab MacKinnon Room 108, 87 Trent Lane, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Amplifying this year’s 30th anniversary edition of The Guelph Jazz Festival (GJF), the improvisation community will gather to reflect on, share, and celebrate the significance and impact of this unique and award-winning world-class event. In this “third decade,” a nod to a 1984 recording by former GJF performers The Art Ensemble of Chicago—a group that has left its own indelible mark on the history of jazz—we pause to consider the vital role that this home-grown community-based event, the Guelph Jazz Festival, has played in shaping the Canadian (and, indeed, the international) musical landscape.

Thinking Spaces: François Houle & Benoît Delbecq, “POISE”

ImprovLab MacKinnon Room 108, 87 Trent Lane, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

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.

Free

Thinking Spaces: Karamjeet Dhillon, “The Body as Knowledge Incubator: Creativity, Improvisation & Embodiment”

ImprovLab MacKinnon Room 108, 87 Trent Lane, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

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!

Free

Sound, Meaning, Education 2023: CONVERSATIONS & improvisations

This three-day conference will convene international and multi-generational scholars, musicians/artists, teachers and students from typically under-represented groups to mobilize research addressing curricular innovation in music and arts education across a variety of diverse cultural contexts, and to advance the development of cross-disciplinary research networks and initiatives. Specifically, the conference (35 presenters, performers and workshop facilitators) will share innovative curricular ideas and facilitate conversations and improvisations centered around the phenomena of sound and sensuous ways of knowing and being in the world — encounters and expressions often hidden by dominant ontologies and epistemologies of western/white colonization, neoliberal agendas, and capitalistic tendencies towards quantifiable, standardized and data-driven teaching and learning.

Thinking Spaces: Kim Solga, “Women Making Shakespeare Now: Decolonizing the Creation Room”

University of Guelph, MacKinnon Building 87 Trent Ln, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

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.

Free