SUSAN SGORBATI

Susan Sgorbati is a choreographer based at Bennington University who founded and operates within the framework of Emergent Improvisation. Much of her practice is initiated from observations of self-organization in nature and academic literature on modelling it. She is in frequent dialogue with researchers in the fields of Neuroscience and Complexity Theory like Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman and the eminent Stuart Kauffman, both of whom are observers of complex phenomena in their respective fields. Conversations with Edelman and Kauffman are publicly available on her website: EmergentImprovisation.org

Complex phenomena in the sense in which use it doesn't necessarily refer to things that are hard to parse or that are made of expansive rulesets. It instead refers to how a sets of simple rules (like an improv score or like the laws of physics) can produce larger structures out of interacting parts. Everyone here has seen complex phenomena they just don't give it a name. Birds flock in tandem with one another because their flight paths are dependent on nearest neighbor interactions, "you go this way i go that way". In the same way, dancers in communciation with one another produce macroscale structures without explicit instruction. Her ensemble scores tend to progress through multiple stages which are classified in the Emergent Forms section of her website. I've linked one such ensemble piece here: The Complex Unison Form

At its most basic, Sgorbati's practice is about Emergence, the production of the macro from the micro. The role of the score is then to facilitate the production of these structures, assisting dancers and forcing them to operate within a greater whole. Going back to self organization in nature, there is of course the flocking score, but there are also solo practices in Emergent Improvisation. Many of the solo practices for instance are based on feeling the interactions of fluid in your body and letting that form a structure. While this seems like a departure from the ensemble scores, it is in fact tracing the same emergent phenomena, just on a smaller scale.