ICCS06/Susan Sgorbati
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[edit] Susan Sgorbati
ICCS Presentation Title: The Emergent Improvisation Project
The Emergent Improvisation Project is a research project into the nature of improvisation in dance and music. In this context improvisation is understood to mean the spontaneous creation of integrated sound and movement by performers who are adapting to internal and external stimuli, impulses and interactions. Ordinarily, we think of order and form as externally imposed, composed or directed. In this case, however, new kinds of order emerge, not because they are preconceived or designed, but because they are the products of dynamic, self-organizing systems operating in open-ended environments.
This phenomenon – the creation of order from a rich array of self-organizing interactions – is found not only in dance and music, but also, as it turns out, in a wide variety of natural settings when a range of initial conditions gives rise to collective behavior that is both different from and more than the sum of its parts. Like certain art forms, evolution, for example, is decidedly improvisational and emergent, as is the brain function that lies at the heart of what it is to be human.
Emergent forms appear in complex, interconnected systems, where there is enough order and interaction to create recognizable pattern but where the form is open-ended enough to continuously bring in new differentiations and integrations that influence and modify the form. It is by way of these interactions that particular pathways for the development of new material are selected.
In linking the creative work of art-making to the emergent processes evident in nature, there is basis for a rich and textured inquiry into how systems come together, transform and reassemble to create powerful instruments of communication, meaning and exchange. This project explores the ways in which natural processes underlie artistic expression along with the possibility that art can help illuminate natural processes.
About Susan Sgorbati:
Susan Sgorbati has been seriously investigating improvisation as a method for teaching and performance for twenty years. For the last five years in collaboration with scientists, she has been exploring the relationship between dance and music improvisation and complex systems. Her work has led her to three residencies at The Neurosciences Insititute in La Jolla, California under the tutelage of Dr. Gerald Edelman and a dialogue with Dr. Stuart Kauffman, who was in residence at Bennington College in the fall of 2004. Susan Sgorbati is on the Dance Faculty at Bennington College, where she was the former Dean of Faculty, and has been teaching since 1983. She created the improvisational ensemble “Materia Prima”, which has performed at The Improvisation Festival in New York City, Improvised and Otherwise in Brooklyn, New York, and other venues nationally. She has done a series of residency workshops with the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts for the last several years, and she is indebted to them for their support of her new work. She is also a professional mediator, who mediates cases for the Vermont Attorney General’s Office and the Vermont Human Rights Commission. She holds The Barbara and Lewis Jones Chair for Social Activism at Bennington College. In 1999, she created Quantum Leap, a program that reconnects at-risk youth to their education. She was recently awarded The 1st Annual David G. Rahr Community Service Award from The Vermont Community Foundation. This new work is the culmination of a co-commissioning project among Bennington College, The Neurosciences Institute, New England Complex Systems Institute, and the National Performance Network Creation Fund. The Creation Fund is sponsored by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, Altria, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). This work has received additional support from the Jerome Robbins Foundation, the Bumper Foundation, and Bennington College.
