Events Calendar

Recent weeks have witnessed changes and upheavals in people’s lives around the globe, as we face the impacts of a global pandemic and of a widespread crisis in social and racial justice. As we begin to learn how to confront our shared distances and to discover hopeful ways of coming together, the improvising arts, particularly music, offer significant opportunities to confront, to explore and to understand some of these vital changes.

1:30-2:30pm: Anna Webber & Angela Morris

3:00-4:00pm: Gerald Cleaver

The International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, at the University of British Columbia, presents this on-line colloquium in collaboration with Coastal Jazz and Western Front to offer musicians and artists an opportunity to engage with these issues in their own creative practices. How does music help us potentially to persevere in the face of crisis? In what ways does improvisation offer sustained hope or sustaining vitality? Does music of the moment, in the present tense, address the possibility of reparation, or of repairing our challenging relationships with each other and with the world? How might the improvising arts encourage communities to move forward?

Audiences around the planet are warmly invited to listen to the talks, and to participate in on-line discussion with each of the presenters. The colloquium strives to uplift, elevate and support the work of significant improvising artists from around the world.