Moving and Playing: Jazz Improvisation and Dance Conversation (April 25, 2010)
Music Performance & Discussion
Participants: Jane Ira Bloom, Carmen De Lavallade, Rufus Reid, Aaron Shafer-Haiss, Andrea Weber
Interdisciplinary collaboration has always interested jazz artists and modern dancers. The song and rhythmic impulse of the body has long inspired jazz musicians, and dancers have always been drawn to the vitality and spontaneity of jazz improvisation. Movement vocabulary-words like "swing"-is often used to describe states of sound, and dancers often use sonic terms to describe the musical qualities of movement phrases. Do musicians and dancers use improvisation in the same way? If the same piece of music were presented to two different dancers, how would their interpretations vary? Two world-class dancer/choreographers, Carmen De Lavallade and Andrea Weber, team up with renowned bassist Rufus Reid, saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, and percussionist Aaron Shafer-Haiss to address these and other questions through improvisation and discussion.
