Emergent Improvisation is a unique process for understanding structures in all principles of organization applied across disciplines.
Emergent Improvisation relates the act of structuring to natural, complex systems and time-based artistic practice.
Emergent Improvisation uses research, education, and performance to understand the act of structuring in nature and art.
As each individual within an ensemble becomes attuned to the specific constraints of the present moment through the Solo Practice, movement and sound choices begin to develop through active listening and compositional awareness, producing self-organized solo, duet, or ensemble forms. This process results in emergence, or a new kind of order or form. These Emergent Forms often exhibit global properties, where the form is greater than the sum of its parts, cannot be broken down without a significant change, and is often impossible to predict. Emergent Forms are highly adaptive because they can change with the present conditions of the environment, furthering their complexity. Currently, there are four distinct Emergent Forms in practice and performance:
The Emergent Solo is grounded in the unique components of one’s Solo Practice and its four disciplines. The Emergent Solo holds a linear progression through time that unfolds, expands, and comes to fulfillment through acute compositional awareness.
The Emergent Duet is a performance form for two artists (dancer and musician, two dancers, dancer and visual artist, etc.) that reveals the dynamic and open-ended expression of form in flux. Each performer has identified a particular kinetic, sonic, or visual vocabulary that exhibits unique qualities of the individuals. In collaboration, a developmental structure comes out of working with this material, resulting in the discovery and investigation of an emergent form.
The Complex Unison form is based on the observation of natural systems, which exhibit self-organizing structuring principles. In this form, open-ended processes are constantly adapting to new information, integrating new structures that emerge and dissolve over time. Complex Unison reveals the progression of closely following groups of individuals in space, to the unified sharing of similar material, and finally to the interplay of that material, which has both a degree of integration and variation, often displaying endlessly adaptive and complex behavior.
In this form, the dancers and musicians create an event that is remembered by the ensemble, and then reconstructed over time, revealing memory as a complex process of creation. Memory of the initial event reveals itself as a fluid, open-ended process in which the performers are continuously relating past information to present thinking and action. This reintegration of past into present draws on repetition, nonlinear sequencing, and emergence to construct new adaptations. The Memory Form was inspired by Dr. Gerald Edelman's concept "the remembered present."
