THE GOLDEN SECTION

In 1981, Twyla Tharp premiered "The Catherine Wheel" on broadway alongside a score by her then boyfriend David Byrne. It was the second in a series of broadway productions for Twyla as she expanded and relaxed into this newfound form of crossover ballet. Composed of 17 sections and 15 dancers, it was an evening length collage wherein she could work in disparate metaphor, creating a vast piece that nonetheless would always come back to the central motif of a catherine wheel, "a spinning firework, a crochet pattern, a flower" (Program Notes Tharp, Twyla 1981). The final part of "The Catherine Wheel", "The Golden Section" is the longest of any section at 15 minutes and makes use of the whole company whereas prior sections were composed of smaller groups. Another differentiating factor of "The Golden Section" is its total absence of narrative. The rest of "The Catherine Wheel" centers around 8 cast members who represent a family, yet in "The Golden Section" they're part of the undifferentiated ensemble. The length and differentiation from the rest of the production has allowed "The Golden Section" to be staged as a standalone piece in companies like The Alvin Ailey Company, the Miami City Ballet, and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. The production of "The Golden Section" that I drew most of my inspiration from is the one availiable on the Renee Wadleigh Library. I was deliberating on whether or not to link to the Alvin Ailey version of it but, to be frank, I think they missed the quality that made it so alluring. The video you're about to see is a televised version of the piece, done by the Miami City Ballet: "The Golden Section"

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.