Maria Batlle, unidentified laptop user, David Rothenberg.
 

August 31 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the AUMI/EMPAC/ARTs Department seminar, “New Instrumentation for Performance” included Maria Batlle and David Rothenberg. Directed by Pauline Oliveros, in collaboration with EMPAC guest artist Tarek Atoui, the seminar is devoted to enabling the hard of hearing and deaf to participate in music making.

AUMI-McGill: At the MacKay Centre School, five McGill MSc students from the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy have completed a manual for the use of AUMI in pedagogic and therapeutic settings, as well as a literature review related to AUMI and other adaptive instruments. In addition, researchers at McGill have designed a light-feedback system for AUMI’s laptop version. Writes Eric Lewis, “We have just completed negotiations to use AUMI at next year’s Jazz Festival at the Montreal Jewish Hospital, teaming with their in-house music therapist, and with the dept. of Child Psychiatry.”

AUMI-KU InterArts and Independence Inc., a community resource center of the Lawrence, Kansas disability community, is partnering with the Lawrence Public Library’s new Sound/Vision Studio to offer AUMI jam sessions and recording sessions for the local community. “Do You AUMI?” is the tagline developed by Ranita Wilks for attracting improvisers to the first meeting October 14.

A new version of the AUMI iPad App is now available on iTunes. AUMI 1.1.2 offers greater compatibility with iOs8, and all previous customers should be able to upgrade. 

Think pieces is a special project curated by PhD student Mark Kaethler.
 
In this piece, Mark Kaethler delineates the different levels in which improvisation works in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), and relates improvisation as performance practice to the film’s depiction of creativity, of whiteness, and of the artist’s place in society. Staged and edited so that it seems to have been done in a single extended take, Birdman’s director and co-screenwriter Alejandro González Iñárritu plays with cherished cinematic tropes, including surprising shifts between diegetic and non-diegetic music. Kaethler concludes, “Birdman challenges the hegemony of Hollywood and white America through recourse to improvisation’s radical and fluid recalcitrance to concepts of the individual genius.”
 
Mark Kaethler is a PhD candidate in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, studying politics and irony in the works of early modern dramatist Thomas Middleton. 

 

Note to Guelph Jazz Festival goers: one of the festival’s best-loved venues, the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre (MSAC), is closed during this year’s festival while it undergoes major renovations. MSAC is especially familiar as the site of the GJF colloquium, but this year, the colloquium will take place at three alternative downtown venues: Heritage Hall, Musagetes, and Silence.
 

An event on September 17 at 7 p.m. will celebrate the gallery’s reopening as the Art Gallery of Guelph.

To Being: Molly Poerstel, Tian Rotteveel, Julian Barnett, Jeanine Durning. 
 

Jeanine Durning is a dance and performance artist whose new piece, To Being, runs at New York's Chocolate Factory Theater until September 26th, alongside a remount of its companion work, inging. The artist writes, "My current research deals with a practice that I started to develop back in 2009 called nonstopping which has manifested as a solo performance practice called inging, and a group performance practice called To Being. Whereas inging proposes the insistent practice of unscripted nonstop speaking as performance, To Being proposes the insistent and imperative relationship to nonstop moving as performance. Nonstopping emerged as a practice when I started to question what the nature, role and relevance of performance is, and how to be able to deal with essential questions about who we are, about dance and the body, about personal history, about collective thinking and experience, about phenomenology, about perception, about theater and fiction, about communication and meaning; To Being proposes the insistent and imperative relationship to nonstop moving as performance. With To Being we are asking: What is at stake? Where is the end? What does it take to stay in action? And how can we give more when we feel that we've met our limit?"