By chance or by design?

How is dance improvisation like neurons in the brain?

No, that's not a riddle, but the kind of question that arises in the new field of inquiry called complex systems. Scientists in this area look for principles of self-organization that cut across such apparently different phenomena as improvisation, brain activity, stock market behavior, and bird migration.

With birds, for instance, "There's no lead bird who dictates, 'Now we'll be in this V,'" said choreographer Susan Sgorbati. "They're forming patterns by sensing where they all are in space, by wind currents. That's what the dancers are experiencing,"

Sgorbati will join 700 researchers--including neuroscientists, physicists, and evolutionary biologists at the International Conference on Complex Systems in Boston, June 25-30. A dance professor at Bennington College, she began talking to scientists five years ago. Their descriptions of how spontaneous processes can generate elaborate patterns, as in migrating birds, echoed what she'd observed in 15 years of improvising in groups.

"With the dancers, there's endless differentiation of how patterns get replicated or how a new pattern emerges from the pattern before," Sgorbati said. "They're building from a simple unison pattern to greater and greater complexity."

Inspired by her conversations with scientists, Sgorbati has developed several improvisation forms that she put onstage for the first time in February. The performance, by seven dancers and three musicians from her Emergent Improvisation Project, took place at the Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in La Jolla, California, where she's done three residencies.

Sgorbati's "Complex Unison" form, for example, sets some basic structures, such as, "at some point, everyone will raise one arm." In La Jolla, the dancers formed fleeting groups, until, near the end of the 14-minute performance, a more involved composition emerged: Two dancers crouched together, two others tangled limbs, and a trio crooked their arms as if holding a fragile object. For Sgorbati, that moment of partial unison marked a jump in the group's self-organization.

For NSI theoretical neurobiologist Anil Seth, it offered a metaphor for brain activity. "Nobody tells each individual neuron what to do, they just do it," said Seth. "Susan is seeing how global patterns on the dance floor emerge from interactions among dancers."

The "Memory Form" reflects the ideas of NSI's founder, Nobel Laureate Gerald M. Edelman, who maintains that memory is "an open-ended process of reconstruction of past into present," according to Sgorbati. The dancers did two identical run-throughs of a two-minute sequence they'd created previously. Subsequent run-throughs retained details of the original, but jumbled them: A different person did a cartwheel: this time, no one supported a dancer's raised leg. It got really interesting, because one's own memory filled the gaps, moving this experiment into the audience's minds.

That audience involvement is what most excited Sgorbati and the performers. "We felt we were engaged in another way of experiencing performance, as if we were presenting research and the audience was giving us feedback as part of the laboratory."

Sgorbati and members of The Emergent Improvisation Project will perform June 25 at the Marriott Boston Quincy as part of the International Conference on Complex Systems.www.necsi.org/ events/iccs6.