New research institute will look to explore improvisation as a tool and agent for cross-cultural understanding and the implementation of social change
In the past few weeks, University of Guelph English professor Ajay Heble has launched the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. The initiative is a new research institute at the university that is backed by a generous 2.5 million dollar grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The institute was launched during Guelph’s Jazz Festival with a “World Percussion Summit,” and was representative of what the initiative hopes to achieve; the use of improvisation as an agent for bringing different cultural and musical experiences together to create cross-cultural communication, creativity, and understanding.
Heble’s interest in improvisation stems from a longstanding involvement with the Guelph Jazz Festival as its founder and artistic director of 25 years. Heble was interested in the way that performers from different cultures and countries who didn’t even speak a common language, or prearrange any musical direction, were able to come together and make music. “There’s something going on in that moment when musicians improvise,” says Heble; “There are lessons to be learned here, lessons on how best we can get along in a globalized world…In an era when diverse peoples and communities of interest struggle to forge historically new forms of affiliation across cultural divides, it seems to me that the civic and participatory virtues of dialogue, respect, engagement and trust that get inculcated through improvisation take on a real urgency.”
Heble is entering the last year of an equally generous seven-year SSHRC grant that funded Heble’s Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice program (ICASP). ICASP has been working closely with communities in Guelph and across Canada using musical improvisation as a tool for developing transcultural understanding, as well as the understanding of pedagogy, media, and a range of social dynamics, politics and aesthetics. ICASP has also played a role in the implementation of improvisation programs for marginalized and at-risk youth across Canada, and has trained the equivalent of two hundred graduate students through such programs. ICASP has also been able to publish its own peer-reviewed journal and a book series on the innovative research.
Through the Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation research initiative (which will be headquartered here at Guelph), Heble’s research team aims to expand on the work that’s already been done through ICASP. Heble’s new institute was ranked number one among peer reviewers, and was one of 20 grants awarded nationwide by the SSHRC. The awarding of a second grant is perhaps representative of both the faith and respect that Heble’s research has garnered in both academic and local communities.
With the new institute, Heble hopes to develop new graduate programs for studies in musical improvisation (other schools involved include McGill, UBC, Memorial, and The University of Regina), which will be the first programs of their kind and will hopefully build some sustainability within the program. The new initiative is marked by a large range of institutional and community partners with a wide range of expertise in different areas. Heble’s new project has researchers with expertise on theatre, drama, dance and law, and even includes a surgeon. “Music was a point of departure,” says Heble, this increased range of knowledge will allow for “more opportunities for research to move in new directions.”
The new initiative will focus around three main areas of research: practice-based research, which focuses on an artist’s performance as a type of research; the creation of experimental technology and media, such as technology that would allow people with limited mobility to play music; and community and social practice, which uses improvisation to inspire social change. “What we’re doing is unique in the world. We’ve propelled Guelph into a world centre for improvisational music as a form of social practice – an engine for change.”