Workroom Conversation: On Improvisation

Join us for the first event in our 2019 Workroom Conversation series looking at questions around improvisation across different practices from music to architecture. We see improvisation as a fundamental way people relate to the world with capacity to loosen up and informalise social life. Improvising is also a survival strategy when, individuals or groups are challenged by unforeseen events. In the arts, improvising makes freedom of expression possible. It is a craft that requires practice to make a master.

Each session opens with two invited practitioners sharing their take on what improvisation is to them and how they use it in their practice to stimulate a broader discussion. On the 10th, the practitioners invited to converse will be Ella Finer and Jacqueline Springer. Richard Sennett, of Theatrum Mundi, will moderate.

The Workroom Conversations are ‘backstage’: there is no audience. Instead, we invite practitioners to share, debate, challenge and enrich. These are conversations rather than public forums. We would be delighted for you to join as many of these as you would like to and bring your ideas to the workbench. Tickets are free but registration is essential.

Ella Finer’s work in sound and performance spans writing, composing and curating with a particular interest in how women’s voices take up space. She studied in Glasgow and London, completing a PhD in 2012 on materialities of the female voice in performance and has taught widely. Her current and ongoing research project about sound politics queries the ownership of cultural expression through sound, so far taking form in published articles, book chapters and public lectures on subjects including feminist legacies of echoic sound, social acoustics and urban infrastructure, and sonic miscellanies or “the wild life of sound“. This work has also informed recent curated events Selector Responder: Sounding out the Archives (I and II) at the British Library (as part of their Season of Sound 2017 and ‘18) and the founding of the Acoustic Commons Study Group in association with Soundcamp 2019. As a trustee for Longplayer Ella produced Longplayer Legacies: Live at the Lighthouse with Laura Cannell, Larry Achiampong and Vanessa Brown with an award from Sound and Music as a 2018 Composer-Curator.

Jacqueline Springer is a London-based print and broadcast music journalist and university lecturer. She is an Adjunct Professor at Syracuse University (London Program), teaching Race, Gender & the Media and Black British Music: Exploring Identity Through Sound. She also works at Fordham University, teaching on their London Liberal Arts program where she leads Race, Class, Gender in Media and Breaking America – Exploring the value of British music, national identity and culture via international success. Jacqueline contributes to BBC arts and culture output – from guest contributor spots on Radio 4’s Front Row, Woman’s Hour and Saturday Review to working as an advisor on the current BBC Radio 4 documentary series, Black Music in Europe: A Hidden History.