A Note on Emergence

“Even the most optimistic champions of self-organization feel a little wary about the lack of control in such a process. But understanding emergence has always been about giving up control, letting the system govern itself as much as possible, letting it learn from the footprints.”
Steven Johnson

“The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah.”
Robert D. Singleton 

In 2009, Karen Kain invited me to create a new work for The National Ballet of Canada. It would be my first creation for a major classical ballet company. I said yes to the invitation in a rush of gratitude and excitement but once came down to earth I faced some crushing doubts about my ability to cope with it.

My own physical language had diverged from classical vocabulary a long time ago and I no longer felt fluent in ballet. I also didn't know the dancers – I was going to meet them and start creating on the same day. The rules, systems and hierarchies of the institution were new and disorienting for me. Most challenging of all, I had just 18 days to make a 30-minute work. 

Recklessly, I decided to work with an enormous cast. (Where else would I have access to so many dancers at once?). I was hoping that with a large cast I could build complexity and impact at breakneck speed.

I also knew I could count on a ballet company to be incredibly rigorous, consistent and precise. A Corps de Ballet can sometimes appear to think with one mind. I wondered if I could draw meaning from the dancers' ability to align and unify. 

With so little creation time, I needed to invent systems so that parts of the piece could self-generate. I was curious to see how the piece might evolve out of its own response to those systems. I wondered if decentralization of the creative process could be the work's subject. And that's how I found myself looking into swarm intelligence and emergent systems in the living world. 

Decentralized control, local decision-making, self-governance and regulation, flexibility, resilience and adaptation: these are core characteristics of highly intelligent groups. Emergence is the mercurial shimmer of a starling murmuration or school of herring. It's the uncanny coordination of an ant colony or slime mold. It's the leaderless mass that acts like a singular super-organism. 

Ballet is also an example of emergence. A code of simple physical structures and rules (technique) is combined into complex dancing (choreography) in the individual. In an ensemble, the dancer contributes to the larger system of the choreography, often responding to local stimuli: align my body with these five people, face this direction, start our system on this musical cue, maintain spacing. 

Unsurprisingly, 18 days was not enough time for an evolution out of chaos and into order. But as I watched the dancers embody these systems, I was moved (as I often am) by the dancers themselves; their skill and intelligence, their generosity and curiosity, their earnestness and diligence. As opening night rushed towards us, the self-generating parts of the work had to be contained and managed while I tried to choreograph the larger questions: not so much how emergence works, but what it might mean, and why we love it. 

There are all these different forms of intelligence in the living world. Our human swarm is just one example. Masses of humans aligned in a task can be chilling or beautiful. Whether it's a ballet company or an army, the collective body has enormous power. Our survival and evolution depend on our ability to work together and it seems to me that humans are always divided and craving unity. When we witness emergence in the natural world, it touches something us; the patterns delight us and the consonance rings true.

Emergence is onstage with Silent Screen November 13 – 20, 2026.

About Emergence

Top Photo: Crystal Pite. Photo by Anoush Abrar.