"Maggie Nicols (or Nichols, as she originally spelled her name as a performer) (born 24 February 1948), is a Scottish free-jazz and improvising vocalist, dancer, and performer.

Nicols was born in Edinburgh as Margaret Nicholson. Her father was from the Isle of Lewis, and her mother is half-French, half-Berber from North Africa. At the age of fifteen she left school and started to work as a dancer at the Windmill Theatre. Her first singing engagement was in a strip club in Manchester at the age of sixteen. At about that time she became obsessed with jazz, and sang with bebop pianist Dennis Rose. From then on she sang in pubs, clubs, hotels, and in dance bands with some of the finest jazz musicians around. In the midst of all this she worked abroad for a year as a dancer (including a six-month stint at the Moulin Rouge in Paris).[citation needed]

In 1968, she went to London and joined (as Maggie Nichols) an early improvisational group, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, with John Stevens, Trevor Watts, and Johnny Dyani, and the group performed that year at Berlin's then new avant-garde festival, Total Music Meeting. In the early 1970s she began running voice workshops at the Oval House Theatre (one of the most important centres for pioneer fringe theatre groups). She both acted in some of the productions and rehearsed regularly with a local rock band. Shortly afterwards she became part of Keith Tippett's fifty-piece British jazz/progressive rock big band Centipede, which included Julie Tippetts, Phil Minton, Robert Wyatt, Dudu Pukwana, and Alan Skidmore. Tippetts, Minton, and Nicols also joined Brian Eley to form the vocal group Voice. Around the same time Nicols began collaborating with the Scottish percussionist Ken Hyder (who had recently moved to London) and his band Talisker.[citation needed]

Maggie Nicols recorded an album with the vocalist Julie Tippetts called Sweet and S'Ours which was an FMP]] import.

By the late 1970s, Nicols had become an active feminist, and co-founded the Feminist Improvising Group, which performed across Europe, with Lindsay Cooper. She also organised Contradictions, a women's workshop performance group that began in 1980 and dealt with improvisation and other modes of performance in a variety of media including music and dance. Over the years, Nicols has collaborated with other women's groups, such as the Changing Women Theatre Group, and even wrote music for a prime-time television series, Women in Sport.

Nicols has also collaborated regularly over the years with Swiss pianist Irene Schweizer and French bassist Joelle Leandre, including tours and three recordings as the trio "Les Diaboliques". Her collaboration with Ken Hyder also continues; the duo incorporate elements of the traditional tunes of their shared Scottish background into jazz improvisations in their most recent project, Hoots and Roots Duo. She has worked with pianists Pete Nu and Steve Lodder, with her own daughter, Aura Marina, with avant-gardists Caroline Kraabel and Charlotte Hug, and with lighting designer Sue Neal in Light and Shade. She performed internationally for several decades, including the Zürich and the Frankfurt "Canaille" festivals, the Victoriaville Festival. She gave solo performances at the Moers Music Festival, the Cologne Triennale, and a number of other creative and improvised music festivals."

"My name is Matilda Rolfsson, I am a percussionist and improviser, who with my artistic research-project "In Motion, Movements with Directions (- from within)" explore the interplay between music and dance in free-improvisation.

With a wider definition of the listening, inspired my dance-colleagues, not only hearing, but also seeing, and sensing everything in the room, I'm intrigued by the idea of an interdisciplinary interplay between music and dance, where none of the artforms lose direction, and energy in the improvisation.

Highlighting the importance of seeing dance and music as equals, but still different, not compromised in hierarchies or language- barriers, I'm interested in reflecting on how a wholeness in an expression can arise from different and individual voices, also what imprint dance has had to my playing after years of interdisciplinary entanglements in free-improvisation.

Reflecting my sounds with the movements of the dancers gives me an expanded freedom to play and improvise freely in different, and even unexpected directions. Not only as a kinetic approach, when playing on my instrument, but also as an imaginative source that arises from the visual aspect of the dance.

To play like a dancer, as if the music was dance^*, continues to be an artistic driving- force for me, advocating that there is very much taced knowledge that that needs to be putted into daylight, not least in the higher music education-system and scenes for experimental music, where I wish the two artforms would appear more integrated.

The more I engage with the subject of my artistic research-project, the more I'm fascinated of the rich and complex interplay that music and dance implies in free-improvisation. However, finding my artistic peers and their antidotes hasmade it graspable.

At the moment I am delightfully inside artistic processes with dancers: Anna Westberg (SE), Marcela Giesche (US/DE)and Bára Sigfussdottir (IS/NO)."

I hold a Bachelor and a Master in performing music, Jazz and improvisation (Department of Music, NTNU, 2009- 2015) with integrated exchange- studies at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London.

^*Inspired by pianist Cecil Taylors quote: "I try to imitate on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes" . A.B Spellman, Four Lives in The Bebop Business, 1967/ 42.

"Mark Wastell, born 1968 and London based, is a versatile musician who has played a central role in the British and European improvised music scene for thirty years. He has performed and recorded extensively and his varied resume includes projects with Derek Bailey, Phil Durrant, John Butcher, Lasse Marhaug, Rhodri Davies, Simon H. Fell, Burkhard Beins, John Tilbury, Mattin, Tony Conrad, Evan Parker, Tim Barnes, Bernhard Günter, Keith Rowe, John Zorn, Peter Kowald, Joachim Nordwall, Otomo Yoshihide, David Toop, Max Eastley, Hugh Davies, Julie Tippetts, Alan Skidmore, Mike Cooper, Chris Abrahams, Stewart Lee, Clive Bell, Arild Andersen, Jan Bang, Erik Honoré, Maggie Nicols, Will Gaines, Thomas Lehn, Thurston Moore and David Sylvian. Mark has also run the Confront Recordings label since 1996."