A gentle yet momentous figure in postmodern dance, Simone Forti died on July 29 at the age of 91 in Los Angeles. She was also a darling of the art world: Her pieces are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Raffaella Cortese Gallery in Milan, and other art houses. And she was a prolific writer, contributing often to Contact Quarterly over the decades.
We think of the formation of Judson Dance Theater in 1962 as the big bang of postmodern dance. But a year earlier, Forti had performed a set of interdisciplinary works she called Dance Constructions in Yoko Ono’s loft on Chambers Street. These pieces, including Slant Board, Huddle, and Hangers, merged functional movement with objects. Both Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton, who performed in those works, were highly influenced by them. As Rainer said later, “Simone was [Judson Dance Theater’s] inspiration and fountainhead. We all owe her.”
Forti was born into a Jewish family in Italy in 1935. When she was 3 years old, her family fled fascist Italy, settling in Los Angeles by the time she was 5. Forti attended Reed College, where she met future minimalist sculptor Robert Morris, whom she soon married. They were both abstract expressionist painters at the time, and together they were drawn into the experimental orbit of Anna Halprin in the Bay Area. With an agile body and witty outlook, Forti embraced the improvisational nature of Halprin’s activities on her outdoor deck.
Forti and Morris moved to New York City in 1959. In 1960, Forti—along with Rainer and Paxton—joined the new class in dance composition offered by Robert Dunn, a disciple of John Cage, at the Merce Cunningham studio. Recalling those days in Dunn’s classes, Forti wrote in Movement Research Performance Journal #14, “Back then, making a piece was like brushing away all the sand and debris to reveal one stone.”
Dunn’s class, which soon included Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Elaine Summers, Deborah Hay, and visual artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Alex Hay, produced so much new work that the group began showing pieces at Judson Memorial Church in 1962. They were an under-the-radar band of rebels reshaping concert dance.
While Forti didn’t join the Judson collective, she performed in the happenings-style theater work of her second husband, the artist Robert Whitman. She resumed her own work in 1966, and two years later drew on her visits to the zoo and adopted various animals’ gaits in “zoo mantras.” This could include serious crawling, banking in circles, or swaying like a polar bear. In her “news animations,” she might clutch or caress parts of her body to indicate mountains and rivers. She developed powerful skills in improvisation, where she could be sensuous and funny at once. In the 1980s, she formed a small group that included David Zambrano and K.J. Holmes, both leading improvisors today.
While she was always intriguing to watch and hear as a soloist, Forti was also terrific as an improvising partner. This 1995 clip from her improvised duet with David Zambrano shows how responsive and daring she could be in duet form. They are both so free that vocalizing and storytelling erupt from the dancing. Sparks fly when their impulses meet or collide.
Forti gave hundreds of performances and workshops over six decades and in dozens of countries. Through most of that time, she also drew, painted, made sound recordings, or invented other forms, like her “face tunes”—sounds derived from the outlines of people’s faces.
Her first book, Handbook in Motion, is a sui generis memoir. In a prose-poem style as elemental as her dancing, she explains how she arrived at her unique aesthetics. For example, when she came to New York from California, she was appalled by all the concrete and skyscrapers. “I remember how refreshing and consoling it was to know that gravity was still gravity,” she writes. “I tuned into my own weight and bulk as a kind of prayer.”
Forti received the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts in 2011, and was honored by Movement Research in 2014 and by Danspace Project in 2019. The Museum der Moderne in Salzburg gave her a full retrospective in 2014, as did the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2023. Also in 2023, Wayne McGregor, artistic director of the Venice Biennale dance festival, presented Forti with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Dance.
