2008 Season
Colloquium Full Schedule
Note: Bios of the Colloquium presenters are given on the "Performers" section of this site, under "Colloquium Day 1 / 2 / 3".
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 3
9:00 am – WELCOME
Steven Liss (Assoc. VP Research, U. Guelph)
9: 15 – 10:30 am KEYNOTE
George Lipsitz (UC, Santa Barbara) – Improvisation and Diaspora: Why New Orleans Matters
10:45 am – noon PANEL
Improvising Cities: Civic Space and Collective Agency
Tamas Dobozy (Wilfred Laurier U.) - Improvising Chicago
Natasha Pravaz (Wilfred Laurier U.) - Brazilian Music and Community Building in Toronto
Sally Booth (U. Guelph) – Interrupted Cityscape: David Wojnarowicz, Camouflage and Recognition
Noon – 1:00 pm LUNCH
1:00 – 2:00 pm PANEL
Improvising Digital Culture
Vijay Iyer (New York)
DJ Spooky (New York)
2:15 - 3:30 pm PANEL
Rebuilding Community: New Orleans Perspectives
Clyde Woods (UC, Santa Barbara) – The New Orleans Blues Epistemology after Katrina
George Lipsitz (UC, Santa Barbara) – discussion
Sunni Patterson (New Orleans) – discussion/performance
Kidd Jordan (New Orleans) - discussion
3:45 – 5:00 pm PANEL
The Writing’s Off the Wall: Improvisation and Theories of Discourse
Cesar Villavicencio (U. East Anglia) – The Discourse of Free Improvisation: A Rhetorical Perspective on Free Improvised Music
Mark Zurawinski (York U.) – Dialogue as an Aesthetic Dimension of Improvised Music
Peter Johnston (York U.) – Getting the Music off the Page: Practice-based Research and the Construction of the Practitioner-Theorist
Yvan Tétreault (McGill U.) – Witty Music?
5:00 – 6:30 pm RECEPTION AND POSTER SESSION (Gallery 4 and Lecture Room)
Participants in the Summer Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation
Jennifer Mc Manus (McGill U.)
Chris Cogburn (Austin, Texas)
Karl Coulthard (U. Guelph)
Jason Wilson (U. Guelph)
Marielle Groven (McGill U.)
THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 4
Concurrent Sessions:
9:00 – 10:30 am PANEL (Lecture Room)
The Great Divide?: Eurological and Afrological Perspectives on Improvisation
Alexandre Pierrepont (Université Paris 7 ) - Cultural Triangulations – Yorubas and New Yorubas Across the Black Atlantic
Brent Mix (Northwestern U.) – Idiom and Empire: The Historicity of Free Improvisation
Alan Stanbridge (U. Toronto) - The Day will Come: Discourses of African-American Authenticity and European Improvised Music
Mark Laver (U. Toronto) – America’s Classical Music: Jazz, Elitism, and the Meaning of Blackness
9:00 – 10:00 am PANEL (Gallery 6)
Free Improvisation, Education, and Cultural Dynamics
Melvin Backstrom (McGill U.) - Improvisation as Freedom? A Bourdieuian Critique of Creative Action
Simon Rose (Middlesex U.) - Articulating Perspectives on Free Improvisation for Education
10:45 – 11:45 am WORKSHOP
Improvising Across Borders: Approaches to Cultural Expression
Sal Ferreras (host), François Houle, Amir Koushkani, René Lussier, Kevin Breit, John Kameel Farah
12:00 – 1:00 pm LUNCH
1:00 – 2:00 pm CONCERT
Matana Roberts’s Coin Coin: Prologue (New York)
Concurrent Sessions:
2:15 – 3:30 pm PANEL (Lecture Room)
Transcending Genre and Language
François Houle and Sal Ferreras (Vancouver Com. Coll.) – SAFA and the Crosspollination of Ideas and Cultures
Rob Wallace (UC, Santa Barbara) – “In a Troubled Key”: Langston Hughes in Performance
Maria Farinha (York U.) - The Other Side of Jobim
Hafez Modirzadeh (San Francisco State U.) - Rising Partials Realizing Sound Come-Unity: Makam X and the Afro-Diasporic Un-Conscious
2:15 – 3:00 pm PANEL (Gallery 6)
Fostering Dissent, Building Communities
François Mouillot (U. Guelph) – Resisting Poems: Expressions of Dissent and Hegemony in Modern Basque Bertsolaritza
Lee Veeraraghavan (U. Western Ontario) – Improvised Hip Hop and Community Building among First Nations Youth
3:45 – 4:45 pm KEYNOTE (co-presented with the TransCanada Institute)
Linda and Michael Hutcheon (U. Toronto) - Jazz/Opera and the Staging of Race
5:00 – 6:00 pm CONCERT
Rouge Ciel (Quebec)
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 5
9:00 – 10:00 am KEYNOTE
Deborah Wong (UC, Riverside) – Improvisation in American Taiko
10:15 - 11:15 am CONCERT
SAFA (British Columbia)
11:30 am – 12:30 pm PANEL
Play What You Are: Improvisation and Affirmation
Greg Tate (New York) – The Black Rock Coalition
Matana Roberts (New York) – Creativity and Improvisation
Jeremy Brown (U. Calgary) – Salvation Army Addiction Rehabilitation Project
12:30 – 1:00 pm LUNCH
1:00 – 2:00 pm WORKSHOP
Induction, Deduction, Conduction: Approaches to Structured Improvisation
Greg Tate (host), Lewis “Flip” Barnes Jr., Paula Henderson, Jared Michael Nickerson, Stephen Lyons, JP Carter, Jesse Zubot, Hidayat Honari, Gordon Grdina, Neelamjit Dhillon, Hamin Honari, Satoko Fujii, Natsuki Tamura, Han Bennink, Wolter Wierbos, Mary Oliver, Michael Moore.
2:15 – 3:30 pm PANEL
Transdiasporic Collaborations in the African Diaspora
Karl Evangelista (Mills College) – The Blue Notes: Free Music and Exile in the Apartheid Era
Jason Squinobal (U. Pittsburgh) - Randy Weston: Preserving African Roots Through Jazz Improvisation
D Y Ngoy (Paris) - Edja Kiungali: Recapturing the African Imagination
Jason Robinson (Amherst Coll.) - Improvising the African Diaspora: Transdiasporic Collaboration and Musical Experimentalism
3:45 – 4:45 pm WORKSHOP
Improvisation, Interpretation, Imagination
Jeff Reilly (host), Barry Guy, Maya Homburger
This colloquium is generously sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Lloyd Carr-Harris Foundation, the SOCAN Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage/Patrimoine canadien, The TransCanada Institute, Magnolia Catering, the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, the Office of the Vice-President, Research, the Office of the Associate Vice-President, Student Affairs, the School of English and Theatre Studies, the School of Fine Art and Music, the School of Language and Literatures, and the Central Student Association at the University of Guelph.
Colloquium Keynote: George Lipsitz
University of California, Santa Barbara
Respected cultural theorist George Lipsitz is a Professor of Black Studies and Sociology, a fair housing and educational equity activist, and author of many publications, including Dangerous Crossroads and Footsteps in the Dark. His timely keynote address is entitled "Improvisation and Diaspora: Why New Orleans Matters".
Wednesday, Sept. 3
9:15 - 10:30 am
Macdonald Stewart Art Centre (Free)
