Last year’s tricentennial ended with an interdisciplinary conference titled Improvisation: New Orleans’ Gift to the Modern World. This year, that conference returns as Improv New Orleans: A Festival of Ideas. Improv in food, music and art will be discussed, among other topics.

This year’s improv conference will take place from November 8 – 10. The event will be put on by the Fertel Foundation in collaboration with The New Orleans Jazz Museum, The New Quorum, the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South and WWOZ. The conference’s roots go back to Randy Fertel’s book “A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation,” which asserts improvisation as an initiator of paradigm shifts.

“When New Orleanian Louis Armstrong invented the improvised jazz solo, he gave ‘a local habitation and a name’ to what New Orleans has always been good at, in music, food, dance, art, books, business, even race relations, and finally, not least in savoir faire, the way we live life,” says Fertel.

The conference’s special presentations will begin on Friday, November 8 with “Improvisation & Creativity: Michael Pollan in Conversation.” Michael Pollan, a journalist, professor and author, will talk with the ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin about their encounters with psychedelics as a form of unscripted reality. Saturday, November 9 the cartoonist Jules Feiffer will discuss his experience with improvisation and art in “Improv and Comics: Jules Feiffer in Conversation.” 

Other events will include conference sessions on Saturday, and on Sunday there will be youth conference sessions and a movie screening. Saturday’s conferences will discuss improv in topics from urban planning to music. Some speakers and moderators will include the author of “Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans,” Dr. Shirley Elizabeth Thompson, Donna Cavato, Chief Program Officer of Communities in Schools of the Gulf South, Inc., and David Kunian, Music Curator for the New Orleans Jazz Museum.

Music fans will be treated to a concert on November 10 featuring drummer and founding member of Galactic, Stanton Moore with David Torkanowsky (Piano), and James Singleton (Bass).

The full schedule can be found at the Improv Conference website. Tickets are $15 for each special presentation, and can be purchased here.