Emergent Improvisation Defined
Written by Susan Sgorboti
The practice and performance of emergent improvisation addresses the nature of improvisation in dance.
In the context of emergence, "improvisation" refers to the spontaneous creation of sound and movement by performers who are adapting to internal and external stimuli, impulses, and interactions without an outside director.
The phenomenon of emergence is found in a wide variety of natural settings. New kinds of order emerge, not because they are preconceived or designed, but as products of dynamic, self-organizing systems operating in open-ended environments. Evolution, for example, is now observed to be improvisational and emergent, as is the brain function that lies at the heart of what it is to be human.
Emergent improvisation explores the way in which natural processes underlie artistic expression along with the possibility that, in turn, art can help illuminate natural processes. In linking the creative work of art-making to the emergent process examined by science, there is a basis for a rich and textured inquiry into how systems come together, transform and reassemble to create powerful instruments of communication, meaning and exchange. While exploring concepts that underlie emergent phenomena, I developed artistic experiential experiments that aimed to amplify to extend our understanding of these issues.
Over the last nine years, in thinking about deep connections between ordering principles in nature and within dance and music improvisation, I’ve been asking: What kinds of forms might we look at that would inform both? What kind of experiments could be set up to find these principles? This investigation has resulted in three areas, research, education, and the practice and performance of Emergent Improvisation.
Over the past seven years, I have been exploring how biological organizing principles found in nature inform structuring processes. I became interested in why ensembles of individual entities (cells, animals, people) exhibit self-organizing, collective behavior. It seems clear that there is a drive, a push, a movement towards forming, towards coherence, towards the matching of time, matter, and location that results in meaning. I believe this collective view of “meaning” is why governance structures, community infrastructure, and education are important to us. The fact that collective self-organized behavior results in a complexity that is highly effective and inherent in the evolution of living things excited me. I recall the exhilaration and sense of creative energy in an artistic improvisational practice. Does a collective sense of connection (meaning) drive the energy to integrate the content, the timing, and the location?
This questioning led me first to conversations with Dr. Gerald Edelman, founder of the Neurosciences Research Foundation, Director of The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, and Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology at the Scripps Research Institute. Dr. Edelman received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1972. His book, A Universe of Consciousness, greatly influenced my thinking.
Dr. Edelman's work includes a theory of consciousness that is based on neuronal group selection. His theory states that there are two fundamental properties of conscious states: integration and differentiation. My understanding of these properties are that every conscious state contains a unified whole and cannot be broken into individual parts and, at the same time, each state can be highly differentiated and lead to many different behaviors.
Another concept of Dr. Edelman’s theory that resonated with my work and influenced my thinking is the remembered present. This concept relates perception to memory. He defines perceptual categorization as “the ability to carve up the world of signals into categories adaptive for a given animal species.” The remembered present links the imagined or immediate present experiences with a past history of behavior. Memory is a process linking past to present, actually reconstructing the past into the present. Memory is dynamic and emergent, not static.
The second scientist whose work greatly influenced me and continues to have a profound effect on my work is Dr. Stuart Kauffman. Dr. Kauffman is a winner of the MacArthur Award, a founding member of the Santa Fe Institute, the leading center where the emerging sciences of complexity began, and recently, the Director of The Institute for BioComplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary. He is often regarded as, “the Father of Complexity”. He currently holds a distinguished position at The University of Vermont. In his books, The Origins of Order and Investigations, Dr. Kauffman is interested in seeking the construction principles of adaptation, believing that the property of such complex systems reside on the edge of chaos—what he calls order for free. Poised between order and chaos, this is a result of a highly tuned selection process based on Darwinian “natural selection” combined with self-organization, emergence and contingency, resulting in the highly robust complex systems we observe. In his most recent book, Reinventing The Sacred, Dr. Kauffman is seeking to reunite the sciences and the humanities by positing a theory that both natural law and ceaseless creativity beyond natural law are both components necessary in creating emergent, complex systems of life. I will return to Dr. Kauffman’s theories later when I apply “emergent structuring” practices to the creation of sustainable agreements.
One of the key elements of complexity is that the emergent property of self-organization is not entirely predictable. Scientist Per Bak coined a term called self-organized criticality. This term relates to the state in which complex behavior in nature reflects the tendency of large systems with many interacting interdependent components to evolve into a poised delicate state, without the direction or design of a central, overriding, or outside agent. This emergent state becomes a complex dynamical system. Do groups of people experience this process of interaction and interdependence? My experience has shown me that groups of people that are in chaotic states, given the right constraints and feedback can self-organize and participate in the process of selecting for a coherent pattern.
This examination of movement and sound patterns led me to name these ideas “emergent improvisation”. In this context, improvisation is understood to mean the spontaneous creation of integrated patterns that 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 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 patterns 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 information are selected. These forms do not primarily involve an exterior agent or outside director, at the least not dictating specific results.
There are three key concepts that link Emergent Improvisation to the science of complex systems: self-organization, emergence, and complexity.
Self-organization, in this context, means the ordering or structuring of people or entities that do not have an outside leader. The ordering is coming from within the system. An impartial third party can play a facilitating role, by providing feedback and pattern recognition, but does not impose the structure on the group.
Emergence--an outcome or property of self-organization—is the process by which some new form, some new ordering, some new pattern, or some new ability arises to move something toward the creation of another idea---opening up or exposing the potential for something new. In this context, emergence suggests a group of people participating in the co-creation of a pattern, investing in a shared sense of a new structure.
Complexity encompasses the process of self-organization to create an emergent form. The study of emergence in complex systems explores how the many components of a particular system give rise to a collective behavior. This collective behavior of people in this context can now participate in the co-creation of new complex structures, recognize its patterns from within, track its patterns and consequences on the local, regional, and global level, and develop an “ensemble-building” capacity.
In my understanding of how nature works, species of all kinds are constantly adapting to their environments to optimize their survival. So as environments become increasingly complex, it would make sense that our adaptive mechanisms need the kind of attention, awareness and information to respond. Systems can form in multiple ways. Many systems are hierarchical, directed by very strong leaders that script or impose a template on the group. Other systems are extremely chaotic, with very little order or organization, such as in a collapsed state. I am speaking about the construction of systems that are complex in this context, and have the potential to adapt readily to changing environments.
An emergent improvisation process (a facilitated dialogue among people with differences) creates the conditions for the principles of emergent structuring. A structure in this context is the arrangement or composition of elements where the complexity of the whole represents more than the sum of its parts. Emergent structures are patterns or forms that emerge from a “point of criticality” where order appears out of self-organizing improvisational processes. These complex systems have structural elements that include main and peripheral events that are framed by constraints and have specific time spans. Structures can be nested within each other and at different scales, occurring simultaneously on the global, regional and local level. Emergent structures are found mainly in nature and in living systems, including human ones. Emergent structures are particularly robust and adaptable, where the integration of form and function are visible.
Ensemble capacities in individuals for emergent structuring are pattern recognition, negotiation of roles, empathy, attention to development, balancing individual choices with ensemble choice making and tracking local, regional, and global relationships and consequences. It is groups of people forming or building a complex organization that results in a highly adaptive, robust structure. Participants need to focus on attention to present reality and its nature of complex information, an understanding of time-based developmental processes, a commitment to collaboration between significant differences of opinion including creating designs for difficult challenges, and a recognition of accountability for people’s actions and the consequences for not following through with agreements.
