Susan Sgorbati has been seriously investigating improvisation as 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 Institute 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. Sgorbati’s Emergent Improvisation Project is a co-commissioning project by the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in partnership with 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). The Jerome Robbins Foundation and the Bumper Foundation are also supporting this research. Sgorbati is currently on the Dance Faculty at Bennington College, where she has been teaching since 1983.
Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance
