The AUMI Consortium is an international research group dedicated to exploring, sustaining, developing, and sharing the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument, a free software download interface that uses camera tracking to facilitate music-making across all abilities. Each consortia site includes at least one IISCI researcher.

From AUMI-McGill: Eric Lewis writes, “This month a segment on our Mackay Center School [the Montreal school for children with motor, speech or sensorial difficulties] project will air on French television, featuring interviews with a number of the McGill-based AUMI researchers and Mackay Center School staff. We have completed our second pilot project at Mackay, and are now analyzing the data.” They will present the preliminary results of this research at the Improvisation and Community Health Conference in June, during which representatives from the different AUMI sites will visit Mackay School and have the opportunity to share AUMI-related research.

From AUMI-Carleton: Ottawa filmmaker Andrew Hall has completed Turning the Page at H'Art of Ottawa, a documentary film about AUMI/IICSI member Jesse Stewart's 2014 collaboration with H'Art of Ottawa, a project in which AUMI figured prominently. The film premiered on March 4, 2015 at the Mayfair Theatre in Ottawa for an audience of over 200. On February 12 & 13, Jesse premiered a new work, I Need You?, with Propeller Dance, a mixed abilities professional contemporary dance group in Ottawa. I Need You? combines AUMI with movement and percussion.

AUMI-CDL/CCC reports that Pauline Oliveros will give a keynote address on “The Ethics and Practice of Listening,” followed by a short Deep Listening workshop targeted at both musicians and legal professionals for the conference, “Just Improvisation: Enriching child protection law through musical techniques, discourses and pedagogies,” to be held on May 29th-30th at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University Belfast.

AUMI-KU participated in sponsoring and presenting at “Improvising in Place: An Interdisciplinary Jazz Studies Colloquium,” held at University of Kansas in March 2.

 

 

Born in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1953, Margaret Dragu began her dance career studying under Dada-influenced Yone Kvietys Young of Calgary, and Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis in New York City. Equally drawn to improvisation and chance operations, she writes that “eventually, after years of performing with musicians, poets, dancers, actors, I formed my own loose method. My improvisation ‘technique’ uses elements of modern dance, tap, flamenco; aerobic dancing, weight training, social dancing; and body movement / gestures derived from cultural / social research on specific subjects (e.g., Edith Piaf's hand movements, seniors rolling shopping carts, etc.).” Her dance style grew to reflect elements of all these styles, and her work in Montreal and Toronto extended from striptease to aerobics. In 1988 Nightwood Editions published her book, co-authored with A.S.A. Harrison, Revelations: Essays in Striptease and Sexuality, and in 1994 ECW published Mothers Talk Back: Momz Radio, co-authored with Sarah Sheard. Dragu’s work is known for being interdisciplinary and site specific. She collaborates with other artists and sometimes, the public, but in a video produced by the Canada Council, she says, “For me, the body is my tool. It doesn’t matter whether I’m taking a photograph, or making a video, or doing a radio presentation, or I’m working on the web, or I’m doing something interactive, or I’m performing, it doesn’t matter, the body, it comes back to the body, or being embodied, even if the body is not really in the forefront." 

Margaret Dragu’s work is often based strongly in activism, whether feminist, environmental, social or otherwise. She won the 2012 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, and continues to live in Vancouver, variously adopting the personae Lady Justice, Verb Woman, Art Cinderella, and Nuestra Señora del Pan.