Listen, Listen Festival 2023
Listen, Listen Festival 2023 The Improvised Arts Society is ecstatic to announce the second annual Listen, Listen Festival! We are partnering with the amazing folks at plastic orchid factory to present a two-day interdisciplinary celebration of improvised arts + spontaneous play featuring some of our city’s most captivating musicians, dancers, and digital media artists. Taking place in historic Chinatown on the unceded ancestral territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations on October 6th and 7th, each afternoon this year’s Listen, Listen Festival will begin with our Happy Hour Social at Left of Main, offering a time to connect and enjoy local food and beverages while checking out our pop-up Digital Media Gallery. Following the Happy Hour, our Main Series programming, also taking place at Left of Main, will be an interdisciplinary feast for the senses showcasing the creativity and vitality of Vancouver’s creative scene. Wrapping up the night around the corner at Toast at Doris, our Late Night Series will be a super fun way to let loose, dance, explore, and immerse in the transportive delights of improvised art!
This year’s Listen, Listen Festival guide…
STAY TUNED for more announcements about our Listen, Listen Festival’s Free Public Workshops!
Scroll down for Artist/Group Bios
TICKETS
Oct 6+7: Happy Hour Social (5-7pm @Left of Main) – a time to gather, connect, and feast! Growing relationships and spending some much needed QT together as artists and art lovers in community. Check out our Digital Media Pop-up Gallery featuring interesting artworks by Mena El Shazly, Josema Zamorano and Ana Valine! This event is FREE and includes food and beverages!
Oct 6: Main Series (7:30-10pm @Left of Main) – Ambr Aria, Like the Mind, Mini Maze
Oct 6: Late Night Series (10pm-12am @Toast at Doris) – Public Dreams presents Improv Karaoke with Cordelia Donovan M’Sadoques, Grace Ma, Greg Samek, Matthew Ariaratnam, Mike WT Allen, and Spencer Schoening!
Oct 7: Dumpling Making Workshop (5:15-6:45pm @Left of Main) – Renée Chan from FoodWerks by True Nosh will be teaching us how to make dumplings from scratch. She will teach you some Chinese words during the class, and provide all the ingredients and equipment for everyone to make dumplings together. We are making traditional dumplings with wheat flour, cabbage and ground pork. It will be a very hands-on and immersive experience.
Oct 7: Main Series (7:30-10pm @Left of Main) – Yawn, Dálava, Shruti Ramani Trio
Oct 7: Late Night Series (10pm-12am @Toast at Doris) – Experimental Waves presents Jazz Latin Syndicate with Atley King, James Danderfer, Aidan Miller, Linaldo Sans, Samuel Cartwright, and Myles Bigelow!
October 6th Line-Up
Ambr Aria
Lief Ambrosia Hall and Matthew Ariaratnam and are both graduates of the MFA Interdisciplinary Arts program at SFU, where they met. Ariaratnam is a guitarist, composer, and improviser, who often works in interdisciplinary collaboration with visual artists, dancers, and theatre-makers. Hall is a vocalist, musician and improvisor, whose work crosses disciplines of video art, installation, performance and sound. Collaborating through both music and video creation they go by Ambr Aria.
Like the Mind Trio***
FX), Lisen Rylander Löve (sax + FX), Lisa Ullén (piano), and Emma Augustsson (cello). These women have pursued their careers to achieve excellence and be recognized internationally for raising the bar of artistic innovation and merit.
Their accolades are countless and they continue to forge ahead in their fields as artists of absolute integrity and outstanding ability. Born out of the unmistakable similarities between their musical sensibilities, Like the Mind is dedicated to
creating sound works that challenge dominant systems, lean into innovation and change, and represent the vast and limitless landscape of their art form.
Improvised music is the spontaneous voicing of these ethics and desires and represents, in the moment, through the language of sound, everything that we feel together.
Like the Mind performs high-level genre-defying music, both free-form and original compositions, using a combination of acoustic instruments and effects processing. Think Lilith and Medusa’s love child in a post-apocalyptic Bladerunner world. Like the Mind has had the pleasure of being in residence at the legendary Fylkingen in Stockholm, where they also performed and recorded their debut album in February of 2020. They have been featured at the
Vancouver International Jazz Festival, where their second live album, Walk So Silently, was recorded on June 28th, 2022. Over the past two years, the members of Like the Mind have created two collaborative art films and one EP. In
2023, Like the Mind will be presented at the prestigious Jazztopad Festival in Poland, tour central Europe and Scandinavia, and headline the Listen, Listen Festival in Vancouver.
Mini Maze
and Magic Maze, as well as a dozen other free improv settings, this will be Feven & Andromeda’s most maximalist outing to date, exploring their shared love of both electronics and wind instruments together. Will the duo grope their way back home along a trail of thread, or meet their doom at the horns of the Minotaur? Tune in to find out
October 7th Line-Up
YAWN
Dálava
Shruti Ramani Trio
Canada and acquired a Bachelor in Jazz Studies (Performance) with a specialization in voice from Capilano University. Her original music is an eclectic combination of the Indian and Jazz traditions. She composes and arranges
music that fuses the two traditions to create dynamic pieces for both large and small ensembles. She leads a collaborative ensemble named Raagaverse with respected musicians Jodi Proznick, Noah Franche-Nolan and Nicholas
Bracewell. Shruti has extensive experience teaching music to people with a wide range of ages, musical abilities, and genres. She has toured the Canadian jazz circuit with the prestigious Ostara Project led by Jodi Proznick and Amanda
Tosoff. She is set to release her first album funded by the Canada Council for Arts.