Drifting Between Extremes 2025

9 June 2025 | JazzAble JazzAble

Exploring the balance of tradition, transformation and creative diversity in improvisation.

📅 July 23–24, 2025
📍 Auditorium Casa dell’Ambiente, Via Simone Martini 57, Siena (SI)

The symposium Drifting Between Extremes aims to explore the multiple dimensions of improvisation as an artistic, cultural, and social practice. Through the perspective of drift, a fluid condition in which continuous adaptation serves both as fertile exploration and as a response to danger, the symposium seeks to examine improvisation as a dynamic ecosystem, constantly moving between different polarities in search of a temporary balance. The theme is intended to investigate the wide range of creative approaches available to artists and performers in shaping their own expressive ecology.

During the symposium, theoretical presentations, performances, and workshops will be offered to explore the theme from different perspectives. The general topic may be further developed through subcategories such as:

Improvisation as an Ecosystem: improvisation understood as a creative force connected to socio-political dynamics, as a vast ecosystem that allows the coexistence of different elements and enables continuous adaptation to the challenges contemporary musicians face.

Transcending Technology: creative approaches to technological construction in improvisational contexts and the subversive use of existing technologies.

Exploring Extremes: improvisation emerging from the coexistence of contrasting elements and from the conflict between different idea, a fertile contrast that allows music to evolve and transform, generating new expressive possibilities.

The contributions focus on exploring control, whether exercised or suspended, within creative contexts, and on its possible relationships with traditional stylistic canons.