The Past, Present, and Futures of Improvised Worldmaking
In this two-part keynote, Eric Fillion and Ellen Waterman draw on their respective archive-based and practice-based research and community-facing work to reflect on the relationship between imagining new possible worlds and bringing them into being, highlighting improvisation as a vital catalyst in the process of co-creative world-making.
What can history teach us about both the limits and possibilities of festival culture in advancing social and racial justice, inclusive democracy, multiculturalism, and reconciliation? To what extent can festivals foster solidarity and connectedness while helping us confront future challenges and uncertainties? Framing festivals as “insubordinate spaces” (Tomlinson and Lipsitz 2019), as participatory assemblages that foster “meaningful encounters” (Duffy and Mair 2017), Eric Fillion maps out answers to the above questions by revisiting the Canadian festivalscape of the 1970s. Attending to the—often improvised—temporal, affective, and relational dynamics of festival participation, he argues that these events allow for the co-creation of temporary yet potent spaces for social, cultural, and political engagement; spaces that can function as laboratories for imagining and rehearsing alternative ways of being in the world.
How can improvisation be a catalyst for worlding more equitable futures for disabled, neurodivergent and d/Deaf people? And what can critical improvisation studies learn from these communities? Arseli Dokumaci (2023) identifies common features of disability and improvisatory arts. Both involve “making do with what you have, on the spot, with utmost ingenuity” and “creativity unrestrained”. Every day, disabled, neurodivergent, and d/Deaf people improvise, making creative use of technology and intersensory approaches to communication to navigate an inhospitable world. They are expert “life-hackers” with invaluable “access-knowledge” (Hamraie 2017), and they have compelling stories to tell. To answer these questions, Ellen Waterman will draw from artistic research projects at the Research Centre for Music, Sound, and Society in Canada over the past five years, and outline the sonic worlding projects developing through the new Sonic Arts Participation Lab at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Together, these keynote presentations navigate continuums of improvisation and co-creation for insights on how more just and inclusive worlds have been (and continue to be) imagined and enacted.
Session chair: Paul Stapleton
Delivered in collaboration with IF 2026, with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
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