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, "The Catherine Wheel" was an The production of the "Golden Section" I drew 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 don't think they did it justice and generally 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.