Starts
Friday, January 22, 2021
Ends
Sunday, January 24, 2021
Submission Deadline
Monday, November 30, 2020
Location
University of Pittsburgh (Virtual)

Music and Movement Virtual Conference January 22–24, 2021 Department of Music, University of Pittsburgh Deadline for Proposals: November 23, 2020 Keynote Co-speakers: Dr. Sherrie Tucker, University of Kansas The Music and Movement Conference seeks to bring scholars, musicians, composers, and performing artists together in conversation regarding the dynamic relationship between movement and music. Each panel will feature both paper presentations and performances, underscoring the ways in which the various subdisciplines of music and the performing arts can inform and reinforce one another. This conference will investigate the role of movement in musical creation, reception, and understanding, addressing topics such as negotiations and dialogues between dance and music, gesture-sound mappings and performer-instrument relationships, migration and music, and kinesthesia and haptic perception. The virtual conference will take place over Zoom on January 22–24, 2021. Applications are due on November 23, 2020, and results will be sent to all applicants in early December. KEYNOTE CO-SPEAKERS: Dr. Sherrie Tucker, University of Kansas; Dr. Michelle Heffner Haynes KEYNOTE TITLE: AUMI Bodies: Movement = Music KEYNOTE DESCRIPTION: AUMI stands for "Adaptive Use Musical Instrument," a project initiated and originally led by composer, musician, humanitarian Pauline Oliveros to create more inclusive improvising communities. Improvising with the AUMI requires physical movement. Because the AUMI is designed to adapt to the physical movement of every body, each body in the group develops a different relationship to it. In this collaborative keynote, Sherrie Tucker and Michelle Heffner Hayes reflect on the capacity and expressivity of AUMI bodies, with a focus on the improvisational dance that has emerged from community AUMI musical improvisation rehearsals, jam sessions and performances. Drawing from footage of performances and interviews with participants, the collaborators reflect on the methodology that emerged from work with the AUMI over a period of years. These reflections reveal how the idealized bodies and the conventions associated with formal dance training yield to diverse body typologies and new definitions of virtuosity in movement. The practice of listening and awareness of codes established by AUMI bodies produces a level of attentiveness and care for the well-being of all participants. This abiding sense of connection extends beyond the moment of performance and into our community interactions in day-to-day life, as well as our intentionality and skills at building what Patty Berne and Sins Invalid call “Collective Access.” In writing about how to create collective access through “webs of care,” Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha offers the model of “solidarity, not charity,” building access for one another “out of mutual aid and respect.” When AUMI bodies move and listen out of “mutual aid and respect” for our many different bodies, the action of mixed-ability improvisation in music and dance becomes a form of community-building, culture-shift, and a site of activism for social justice.