Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium 2025
Dance with the Music: Movement in the Improvised Arts
September 11-13, 2025
ImprovLab
University of Guelph
What does it mean to move in flow, to sound out (and instigate) new possibilities for living and being otherwise? What repertoires do we have to critically engage with the world, to move the needle? What is the work that dance and music do—together—to inspire new modes of interaction and exploration, of relating to one another? What role does improvisation play in this?
The 2025 edition of the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium seeks to foster conversations and art making around and about these questions. It also invites interrogation of the terms that comprise the title Dance with the Music: Movement in the Improvised Arts; their epistemology and juxtaposition as well as the sometimes elusive and contested meanings of their filiation.
In acknowledging the potentialities (and politics) of dance and music, this year’s colloquium explores the space between co-presence and togetherness, between sound and movement, to reclaim, remember, enact, and compel. It combines a range of presentation formats and creative works, looking at history, archival recovery and interpretation, artivism, transcultural creativity and belonging, critical pedagogy, arts-based community making, and the radical (collective) power of care.
This event is free and open to all! Please RSVP by selecting a free ticket via EventBrite.
Full schedule with abstracts follows; for a simplified schedule, click here.
GJFC Personnel
Colloquium Director and Curator: Eric Fillion
Colloquium Manager: Julia Busatto
Communications Coordinator: Chris Worden
Co-Technical Directors: Emma Bortolon-Vettor, Colin Harrington
Graphic Designer: Lucy Bilson
Assistant Graphic Designer: Kathryn Cobbler
Technicians: Ryan Ahlers, Brent Rowan
DAY 1 (1 pm to 9:30 pm)
1 to 1:10 pm – Opening Remarks
Eric Fillion
1:10 to 2:15 pm – Intersection of Ritual, Folk Rhythms, Improvisation, and Music Technology
Val Jeanty and Ravish Momin
Moderated by Joe Sorbara
This two-part session—one focusing on Haitian culture; the other, on Mumbai Street bands—will feature Val Jeanty and Ravish Momin discussing and providing examples of their unique take on global music, an approach that is characterized by the noticeable absence of traditional instruments and a vision of cultures as dynamic and continuously adaptive.
This session is part of Ravish Momin and Val Jeanty’s week-long residency with Ivvy at ImprovLab, which will culminate with a performance by the trio at the Guelph Jazz Festival.
2:15 to 4:00 pm – Show Girls: On the Politics of Dance in Jazz Culture and Beyond
Vanessa Blais-Tremblay, Emilie Jabouin, and Désirée Rochat
Moderated by Alyssa Woods
Meilan Lam’s Show Girls (1998) presents interviews with three Black women who danced in Montreal clubs and cabarets during the height of the Jazz Age. Taken together, their experiences span the 1920s through 1960s—a time when Montreal was Canada’s largest city, with world-class nightlife. Against a backdrop of photos and footage sourced from Concordia University’s archival jazz collection, the film provides a detailed portrait of the dancers who helped shape Montreal’s jazz scene. The screening will be followed by a conversation between three scholars and practitioners who are doing vital work around and about the politics of dance in jazz culture and beyond.
4:00 to 4:20 pm – Coffee Break
4:20 to 6:00 pm – Shirley Graham Du Bois’ Tom Tom: Film Screening and Conversation Around and About the Reimagining of a 1932 Opera
Julie Richard with Liberté-Anne and Yesenia Fuentes
Moderated by Marsha Myrie Obi
Tom Tom is Shirley Graham Du Bois’ 1932 opera, and likely the first ever written by a Black woman. The long-lost score, rediscovered in 2001, tells a story that moves between the African continent, a slave plantation, and 1920s Harlem. Under the artistic direction of Julie Richard—a Haitian-Canadian composer, musician, and historian of Black Women composers—the first Canadian production of Tom Tom brings the opera into closer relation with the contemporary Black experience. Performed by Les Angles Mortes, this version was captured on video during the COVID-19 pandemic, which prevented staging and touring of the show. We are thrilled at the chance to present a stunning document of this monumental work. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Julie Richard who will be joined by Liberté-Anne and Yesenia Fuentes, two members of Les Angles Mortes with whom she will perform later in the evening.
6:00 to 7:15 pm – Dinner
7:15 to 8:30 pm – Big Ideas in Improvisation: Improvising in this Moment
Patricia Nicholson
Moderated by Daniel Fischlin
As Artist/Musician/Dancer/Poet/Teacher/Organizer
We are Keepers of the Spirit/of the Light
We must find our way back to each other, and to the Community that needs us.
Big Ideas in Improvisation is a public showcase for provocative thinkers and creative practitioners to share ideas and insights about the power, expansive force, and urgency of improvisation. Intended for a general audience, these lectures encourage us to consider how the artistic practice of improvisation can translate into broader spheres of influence and action by putting pressure on unquestioned assumptions, helping us discover new ways of being, and enacting potential solutions to some of our most pressing global challenges.
8:30 to 9:30 pm – Krik? Krak! Chant Lakansyèl!
Julie Richard, Liberté-Anne, and Yesenia Fuentes Trio
Introduced by Eric Fillion
Julie Richard leads this guided improvisation trio (with Liberté-Anne and Yesenia Fuentes), which operates as a modular performative research unit exploring the emotional terrain, sonic textures, and ancestral resonances that will eventually inform a larger multimedia production. Working from visual mood boards, poetry fragments, and thematic cues drawn from Haitian revolutionary memory, Afro-diasporic ritual, and erased women’s histories, the performers build a structured-yet-fluid live piece. This iteration of the project, titled “Krik? Krak! Chant Lakansyèl!” is a 45-minute, five-section meditation on ancestral strength, resistance, and spectral memory.
DAY 2 (9 am to 4 pm)
9:00 to 9:30 am – Coffee and Refreshments
9:30 to 10:30 am – Dance with the Music: On the Interplay of Movement and Sound
CoexisDance (Raphael Roter), Pratibha Arts (Bageshree Vaze), and Classic Roots (Joshua DePerry)
Moderated by Leslie Fisher
Movement and music are inextricably intertwined. This session examines what we can learn from their relationship, and the importance of reflecting on the connection between these forms during the creative process. Session participants will discuss the individual roles of dance and music, the part that improvisation plays in their dynamic, and where to begin when consciously putting movement and sound in a creative partnership.
10:30 to 11:15 am – The Flex Movement Bloc
Ivvy
Moderated by Jordan Zalis
A unique outgrowth of Black urban/working-class culture in Brooklyn, New York, FlexDance has gained broad recognition on international stages over the past few years. However, the original creators and innovators of the practice have often gotten sidelined; their contributions scantily acknowledged. In this session, Ivvy speaks about the aesthetics of FlexDance, demonstrating its interdependence with music while also reflecting on the communities that developed around the art form.
This session is part of Ivvy’s week-long residency with Ravish Momin and Val Jeanty at ImprovLab, which will culminate with a performance by the trio at the Guelph Jazz Festival.
11:15 to 12:15 pm – Archiving Performance and Dance History
Amy Bowring and Robert VanderBerg
Moderated by Sharon Engbrecht
A live performance happens in a moment and is gone. It is a part of our intangible cultural heritage. Even performance forms that are notated still contend with the ephemerality of the artist’s interpretation of a work. Capturing the traces of live performance often means collecting all the tangible accompanying elements, such as programs, photos, publicity materials, A/V recordings, props, sets, and costumes. Archiving Performance and Dance History will discuss the unique implications of archiving the ephemeral and how today’s archivists are finding innovative ways to preserve this aspect of our heritage.
12:15 to 1:30 pm – Lunch
1:30 to 2:30 pm – Time Frequency Conversions: EEG Applications in Music and Dance
Andrew Staniland and Rebecca Barnstaple
Moderated by An Kosurko
Anchored around the release of The Laws of Nature, a brand new classical/electronic album, composer Andrew Staniland and dancer Rebecca Barnstaple explore applications for EEG (electroencephalography) in composition and dance research.
Over the past decade, Staniland has been developing JADE, a versatile tool that expands upon conventional tactile means of performing music, employing sensors that measure environmental traits such as humidity, temperature, elevation, and neural frequencies. Over this same period, Barnstaple has developed innovative methods that use EEG in dance-based research with applications for health and wellness. This panel will be a shared exploration of their bodies of work, including a live demonstration of JADE along with discussion on data sonification and interpretation in both arts and sciences.
2:30 to 3:50 pm – Untitled: What’s in a Name? Healing the Chasm
Heather Cornell, Aimée Dawn Robinson, and Georgia Simms
Moderated by Kimberley McLeod
80 minutes, three dancers, and a community speculating on the connections between dance and music. Through discourse, voice and body, reflecting over 90 years of combined and varied professional experience in dance and music — IMPR PhD students Heather Cornell, Georgia Simms, and Aimée Dawn Robinson challenge each other’s understanding of who we are during this live panel session. What connects and/or separates cultural beliefs and definitions of dance and music — since time immemorial, yesterday, today, and for the next seven generations? Together, through the lenses of collaboration, embodied memory, oral tradition, academic engagement, and improvisational practice — perhaps, through this dialogue, we will offer an alternative title for our times. Please join us, won’t you?
3:50 to 4:00 pm – Closing Remarks
Eric Fillion
4:30 to 6 pm – Guelph Jazz Festival Reception
Hosted at Miijidaa (41 Quebec Street in Downtown Guelph)
DAY 3 (9 am to 11 am)
9 to 11 am – Partake, Offer, Witness: Open Session for Movers and Musicians
Hosted/lightly guided/conduced by Rebecca Barnstaple
Movers and musicians are invited to ImprovLab for a two-hour session exploring shared practice(s), translatable elements, and collective creation. Bring your body/instrument for two hours of play and discovery, tuning, listening, fun, and generosity. All welcome!
