This fall, ICASP’s 2012 Improviser-In-Residence program will resume with the arrival of two extremely talented Canadian improvisers and artists. Their interdisciplinary post involves initiating community impact workshops, musical dialogue, and performances, in order to advocate for community-building through creative practices. The Improviser-In-Residence program is a collaborative partnership with Musagetes.
Scott Thomson is a trombonist and composer who works in Montréal and Toronto. He plays in regular ensembles in many styles, and prizes ad hoc improvising as a way to meet many creative people. He has studied with Roswell Rudd, Jean Derome, Eddie Prévost, and John Oswald. He leads The Rent, a quintet dedicated to repertory by Steve Lacy as well as Scott’s songs. The Rent’s all-Lacy self-titled debut recording was released on Ambiances Magnétiques in 2010. Scott helped to found the Association of Improvising Musicians Toronto (AIMToronto), where he served as a director until 2009, and co-directs the AIMToronto Orchestra, which was formed for a celebrated collaboration with Anthony Braxton in September 2007. Until 2010, Scott was the artistic director of Somewhere There, a performance space for live creative music in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood that he founded in 2007. Scott has composed a series of site-specific works that he calls ‘cartographic compositions’ for mobile musicians and audiences in unconventional performance contexts for which he has had several notable commissions and residencies.
Based equally in Toronto and Montreal, Susanna Hood, Artistic Director of hum, is a compelling and virtuosic performer in dance and music. For over a decade, she has been synthesizing voice and movement into a dynamic practice through which she creates intimate, raw and sensual performance work. She has performed the works of various Canadian choreographers, composers, and filmmakers (including David Earle and Christopher House – as a member of The Toronto Dance Theatre – Peter Chin, Tedd Robinson, John Oswald, Nilan Perera, and Phillip Barker) and has performed widely as an improviser both in dance and music. Her choreography, compositions, and interdisciplinary collaborations have been presented locally, nationally, and internationally on stage and film since 1991.
Awards include the 1998 K.M. Hunter Emerging Artists Award in Dance and the 2006 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Performance in Dance for She’s gone away. Most recently Susanna was the recipient of the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for Outstanding Achievement in the field of Dance.
Theatre credits include Assistant Director/Movement Coach to Jennifer Tarver for both Nightwood Theatre’s production of Sarah Kane’s Crave in 2007 and the Stratford Festival’s production of George F. Walker’s Zastrozzi in 2009 as well as Co-Direction with Jennifer Tarver for the National Theatre School’s production of Edward Albee’s Everything in the Garden in 2011.
Susanna also sings and dances with The Rent, and since 2010, she has been a regular vocalist with Toronto’s Woodshed Orchestra, led by drummer and songwriter Dave Clark.
Susanna has been teaching and coaching individuals and groups in voice and movement integration since 1999. Her teaching practice has drawn on her in-depth work with such teachers as voice masters Richard Armstrong and Fides Krucker, Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theatre, Emilie Conrad’s Continuum Movement, as well as from her own evolving creation process. Having recently received her certification in Open Source Forms (OSF) from Stephanie Skura, Susanna offers this method as one of the main containers for an exploration into the moving, sounding, creative self. As an ‘open source’ system, OSF combines some of the intrinsic ideas and spirit of Skinner Releasing with the evolving practices of its teachers.
Since 2005, Susanna has also been teaching Improvisation at the School of the Toronto Dance Theatre.
Stay tuned for more news about the dynamic, innovative, and collaborative projects and workshops that Scott and Susanna are planning with various community partners in Guelph this autumn.