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The Beginning
Co-founders Nicole Rampersaud, Germaine Liu and Parmela Attariwala met when we all lived in Toronto. When Nicole moved east and Parmela west, we came into contact with incredible improvisers who didn’t know the people we knew.
Our inspiration to initiate Understory arose from the opportunity provided by the pandemic to re-imagine technology as a potent medium
for changing mainstream performance ecologies;
to engender cross-community collaboration and creation
and bridge Canada’s vast geographic distances.
Technology
We were inspired by the imaginative ways artists have used technology over the past year to create and disseminate art.
Some of the new modes of creation have highlighted the unique capacity of improvisers to create multi-authored works of sonic art, works that showcase improvisers’ empathetic and collaborative listening skills, along with technical fluency of their instruments/voices/media.
Understory uses technology as a pollinator for a new kind of art-making and artist meeting; breaking us away from our local pods, activating the emergence of new conversations, enriching exchanges of knowledge. It is not traditional improvised music, nor is it intended to be a replacement for real-time playing (dancing, singing, rhyming, painting) together in one space improvisation.
Yet,
the process relies upon our skills of being present with each other and with ourselves;
Of creating something magical
in the space between us
that goes beyond what we can create individually.
Geography
By using technology, we can connect the geographic distances that have kept improvising artists across the country from knowing about one another and from working together.
While many improvising artists in Canada have links to international communities, we miss out on the wealth of creativity within the country.
We also recognize that there are many soundmakers and visual artists who have not been part of the improvised music community
(due to genre/discipline/geography), but who could be.
We want to open the community to them, and at the same time, open us to their sounds, visions, and ideas;
so that the “us” and “them” dissolves
into an abundance of artistic possibility and potency.
Re-Imagining Curation
In Understory, we want to cultivate a national collective for creative sound makers.
To keep the network of artists (and audiences) continually expanding, we are dispensing with the traditional way of curating by having curatorship last only one season and by having the responsibilities of selecting artists and managing the series shared by three people.
We believe that the richness of handing over artistic direction is akin to churning soil each season. It allows for the cultivation of new growth and an ever-expanding community. New creative direction means new momentum each season.
It also means not getting stuck in a singular vision of the “what” and the “how”.
The understory will be always changing—nourishing new and different connections.