About

Founded by Dr. Ajay Heble (Founder and former Artistic Director, Guelph Jazz Festival) and presented by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, IF (Improvisation Festival) began as a 24-hour celebration of creative art-making showcasing new, improvised works. Created in response to the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, this annual Festival is dedicated to showcasing an incredible array of new, original performances by improvising artists of all disciplines, for audiences residing around our home in Guelph, Ontario, as well as digital attendees from all around the world.

Since the Festival’s inception in 2020, IF has featured 400+ artists of all artistic disciplines hailing from over 25 countries. Through digital video livestreams and simultaneous international radio broadcasts, IF has reached thousands of attendees from 55+ countries.

IF is now curated by Dr. Eric Fillion, IICSI’s current director, who carries on the work initiated by Dr. Ajay Heble. With his emphasis on experimental music forms outside of the free jazz idiom, Dr. Fillion puts a unique curatorial spin on IF‘s programming!

IF 2025

Our sixth annual Improvisation Festival will run from November 28-29, featuring a mix of in-person programming at our state-of-the-art research and performance facility, ImprovLab (MCKN 108, University of Guelph). Curated by IICSI Director Dr. Eric Fillion with support from local presenters Wet Sounds, Audiopollination, and coexisDance, the festival will also include streaming archival footage of improvised performances. Check out the schedule page for more information!

IF 2025 falls during the “16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence” (November 25th-December 10th). We encourage you to support Guelph-Wellington Women in Crisis during this time.

Our Team

Artistic Director: Eric Fillion	Festival Manager: Julia Busatto
Technical Directors: Emma Bortolon-Vettor and Colin Harrington	Communications Coordinator: Chris Worden
Administrative Assistant and Archives Coordinator: Sam Boer	Graphic Designer: Lucy Bilson
Graphic Design Assistant: Kathryn Cobbler	Audio Technicians: Brent Rowan and Ryan Ahlers
Technical Assistants: Mike Hansen and Steven Donnelly	Front of House: Amy Hwang, An Kosurko, Jordan Zalis, Lynda Lehman, Justine McCloskey
Photographer: Gabrielle Tyrie	Advocacy Coordinator: Sharon Engbrecht

Curatorial Statement

Even though we all know it, we must continue to make the argument that art matters—that creative and collaborative forms of expression are vital in responding meaningfully to the polycrisis we face today. Launched in 2020 and presented by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI), IF (short for Improvisation Festival) has provided both a stage and a forum for doing exactly that work, activating diverse energies of creativity, awareness, care, and inspiration for the past half decade. The annual event returns to Guelph on November 28th and 29th. Please do join us.

Founded during the COVID-19 pandemic by my predecessor, Ajay Heble, IF began as a 24-hour online celebration of creative art making, showcasing an incredible array of new, improvised works for audiences residing near our Institute in Guelph, as well as for digital attendees from around the world. The annual festival has since transformed into a hybrid gathering, even leaving the city of its inception for Mexico City in 2024. Plans are now under way for it to travel to Belfast in 2026.

This year’s edition of IF is scheduled to take place in person at ImprovLab, IICSI’s state-of-the-art research and performance facility, and features experimentalists and improvising artists from all disciplines living and working on this side of the 49th parallel—an exhilarating community-minded program composed of artists from across Canada. It is also worth noting that the lineup features strong local artist representation, curated in collaboration with the Wet Sounds, Audiopollination, and coexisDance series. It also includes streaming archival footage of mesmeric improvised performances from the IICSI vault.

Once again, please do join us for an exciting bill that features legendary Quebec counter-culture figure and ESP-Disk recording artist Erica Pomerance, backed by local improvisers Joe Sorbara, Germaine Liu, and Dan Loughrin; Roger Tellier-Craig, a founding member of Fly Pan Am and Le Révélateur, with Karl Lemieux, GY!BE’s current projectionist and a cofounder of the Double Negative experimental film collective; acoustic feedback, or rather, David Tudor enthusiasts Matt Rogalsky and Dimitri Georgaras; electronic and improvisational harping dabbler Sarah Pagé; award-winning Cree multidisciplinary artist Vee J. Sparvier-Wells in a duet with dancer Chantelle Mostacho, a powerful artistic voice in today’s wh/aacking community; instrument maker and performance artist Kristina Guison; and many more!

The festival is free and open to all! Mark the dates and be there!

— Eric Fillion

How to Get Here

ImprovLab is located at:
MacKinnon Building, Room 108
University of Guelph
87 Trent Lane
Guelph, Ontario
N1G 1Y4

ImprovLab is a reasonable walk (35 minutes) or bicycle ride (10 minutes) from downtown Guelph. There are also several bus routes (through Guelph Transit, GO, and Megabus) that can help get you to ImprovLab. If you are planning to drive, you can find information about visitor parking at the University of Guelph on the University’s Parking Website.

History

Every year, IF takes on new significance.

The festival originated as an instinctive response to the emergence of the COVID-19 Pandemic. The goal was clear: to immediately commission new, improvised performances, and showcase these innovative pieces for a global audience via online streaming. Within just three months, this idea became a reality. The response was overwhelming: dozens of partners and sponsors from across the globe came together to sponsor over 150 artists working across nearly every artistic discipline, including music, dance, poetry, film, theatre, comedy, multi-media, and everything in between.

The works presented at IF 2020 became an early, ephemeral archive of the first few months of the pandemic. Over 24 hours, international audiences came together to bond over these performances. Praised as “a huge, cathartic rite” (Musica Jazz), IF 2020 saw improvisers use this moment of singular societal change to chase emerging ideas and feelings with profound honesty and vulnerability. These stuck-at-home improvisers substituted with abandon, using the limited resources in their homes and local environs to make magic.

Following the success of our initial festival, IF 2021 went even bigger: more international co-presenters, more radio broadcasters, and more performances! There was so much exciting new work to present that this edition of the festival ended up including over a full day of performances—stretching to 25.5 hours, to be exact!

Set against the backdrop of a tentative emergence from the pandemic, IF 2022 took on the theme Towards New Futures: Improvising in Transition. This festival expanded beyond its all-night digital performances to include—as its grand finale—an in-person (and livestreamed) performance at the University of Guelph by the enthralling Toronto-based taiko group Nagata Shachu. This was also the first iteration of IF that was connected to an academic conference. IF 2022 dovetailed with Curating for Change: The Work that Music Festivals Do in the World (presented by IICSI, Queen’s University, and the University of Guelph), which brought together scholars, artists, organizers, and patrons to reflect on the role that music festivals play in our communities; this conference’s keynote address and performance by William Parker and Patricia Nicholson launched IF 2022.

IF 2023, our fourth iteration, featured robust, in-person programming at IICSI’s new state-of-the-art performance space, ImprovLab, and in other spaces across the University of Guelph campus—all while continuing to offer the Festival’s distinctive online stream. The Festival also coincided with two other stellar events: an exhibition celebrating 15 years of research in the field of Critical Studies in Improvisation, titled Improvising Communities: A Retrospective Exhibition, and the 2023 Sound, Meaning, Education conference: CONVERSATIONS & improvisations. Centred on the theme Restless Imagination: Improvising the New Normal, IF 2023 showcased legendary and emerging improvisational performers mixing skill, vulnerability, and daring to make meaning out of this moment.

Built from the theme Silence-Producing Machine, IF 2024 showcased legendary and emerging improvisational performers from “the territories of the ñ.” This was our first in-person festival outside of Canada— was a partnered project between the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, and 17, Institute of Critical Studies in Mexico City, Mexico.

Explore IF!

Check out the previous Festival line-ups in our archives: IF 2020 / IF 2021 / IF 2022 / IF 2023 / IF 2024
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