We are pleased to announce the initial book launch for Soundin’ Canaan: Black Canadian Poetry, Music, and Citizenship, by Improvising Futures team member, Paul db Watkins on Thursday, February 6, at 7:00 PM (PST). The event will take place in person at The Vault Café, (499 Wallace Street, Nanaimo, BC). The book launch is by donation…

In this discussion, we’ll shed light on the art-theoretical approaches of the hakosalo_tuhino duo. Our improvised music comes from the archaic kantele playing tradition, where you are in the music instead of making it. Drawing from the deep listening method, our sonic expression is a spatial and temporal experience that cannot be recorded and repeated.

Our improvised music comes from the archaic kantele playing tradition, where you are in the music instead of making it. Drawing from the deep listening method, our sonic expression is a spatial and temporal experience that cannot be recorded and repeated.

Improvisation is a challenging topic to study using the theories and methods of cognitive science owing to the difficulty of defining it, and the diversity of improvisatory practices. I share my theoretical frameworks for engaging this challenge as well as the results from some behavioral and neuroscientific studies. Ultimately, I draw upon improvisation as a case study for exploring the difficulties of using science to understand music more generally.

In this combined presentation and workshop, Justine Woods will discuss garment-making as research-creation with particular focus on the role garments play in resisting settler colonial displacement of Indigenous ontologies and bodies to place. Informed by her PhD dissertation research, Justine will expand upon the concept of ‘re-stitching’ as both a theoretical framework and embodied practice in exploring how the act of garment-making done by the Indigenous body can regenerate Indigenous ontology and re-stitch new worlds and futurities.

Audiopollination Guelph returns for our second episode of Season 3, featuring new lineups of musicians and performers performing improvised music never before heard! It’s most likely going to be a chilly evening, but I hope you can make it for the final night of improvisation and community in 2024! (more to come next year)

The University of Guelph’s newest IMPR cohort—Georgia Simms, Mark Leroy, and Simon Flint—have been hard at work this semester thinking and writing their way through their research topics, questions, and methodological frameworks. A significant part of research, especially in its early stages, is to come together to listen, share ideas, locate convergences, offer critique, and grow together as a supportive scholarly community.

Each week this semester we have been engaged in such activities. Now, we are pleased to invite the wider research community to join us for a few hours as the three present their work. Presentations will be twenty minutes with an additional ten to fifteen minutes allotted for Q&A.

Ranging from the terrifying embrace of the slave ship’s hold to the racist encoding of ‘cuddly’ toys, On Cuddling is a unique combination of essay and poetry that contends with the way racial violence is enacted through intimacy. Informed by Black feminist and queer poetics, Antwi focuses his lens on the suffering of Black people at the hands of state violence and racial capitalism. As radical movements grow to advance Black liberation, so too must our ways of understanding how racial capitalism embraces us all. Antwi turns to cuddling, an act we imagine as devoid of violence, and explores it as a tense transfer point of power.

In collaboration with Ed Video, the GFF will be screening Patricia Franquesa’s My Sextortion Diary at the ImprovLab. The film documents the experience of the filmmaker after her laptop is stolen and an anonymous hacker begins sending intimate images of her to her contacts, demanding payment to stop. Realizing that thousands of others have had a similar experience, and that the authorities will be of little help, Franquesa takes it on herself to figure out a way to end this situation. Franquesa tells her story with humour and candour, via texts, emails, and phone calls, refusing to be shamed, and “reclaiming the fragments of her body.”

Please join us on Tuesday, October 22 at 12:15 PM(ET) for “Singing in the Circle,” with the GCVI Chamber Choir, Carey West, and Joe Sorbara. This concert will take place at the “How To Draw A Tree” Wellness Circle, at the SW corner of Johnson Green, University of Guelph Campus (across from the Reynolds Building near Gordon Street). The event is free and open to all students and community.

Don’t miss the GCVI Chamber Choir (directed by: Lane Osborne) improvising with vocalist Carey West and percussionist Joe Sorbara in a special collaboration with the IICSI!