by Meghan DellaCrosse
For over 50 years, dedicating her focus to movement, Simone Forti has maintained a constant trajectory, spanning the boundaries of multiple disciplines and continually developing some of the most innovative work of her generation. She is an artist who, unlike most, provokes a sentiment that feels equally familiar as captivating. Beginning in the early 1980s, Forti’s interest in movement led to the development of her logo-motion technique and News Animation improvisation work, mobilizing the relationship between movement and spoken language, activating the space between the two over time. Forti’s singularity is marked by her empathetic ease of motion developed through years listening to the movement around her while “keeping track of her own melody.” During her recent visit to New York this past October, the Roulette theater hosted Forti in downtown Brooklyn for two evening events: a lecture, and An Evening of Movement, Sound and Spoken Word. During her lecture, Forti acknowledged the beliefs and influence of her lifelong mentor, Anna Halprin, whose program centers on developing kinesthetic intelligence through improvisational methods. Standing and moving casually new throughout her talk, Forti (accompanied by patient gestures of hands and body) explained how Halprin taught her to, “See any movement as movement—through a chair, or even taking in how a plant makes you feel.” Then, shrugging with laughter: “If you’re like me, and you move and move and move—you really get to know your instrument!” Throughout her career, Forti’s artistic and conceptual flexibility reveals a continual process, maintaining the handful of things she unravels over time, topractice maintaining the momentum.
Born in Florence, Italy in 1935, Forti’s family emigrated to the US in 1939, settling in Los Angeles, where she was raised. She met her first husband, artist Robert Morris, while briefly attending Reed College in Portland, Oregon. In 1956, the couple dropped out and moved to San Francisco. Sharing a studio with Morris, who was painting at the time, Forti learned how to build her own canvases and began to paint. However, her foray into painting was brief. Owing to the dimensions of her early paintings–– generally six-feet high by five-feet wide––long-term storage was a sizable inconvenience; the only remains of this early period are Forti’s recollections. Enrolling in Anna Halprin’s improvisational dance workshop in 1956 changed everything. Halprin immediately captured Forti’s imagination, teaching her how to understand and learn from her own body by listening to the world around her. Abandoning modern dance in 1955, Halprin began offering workshops on her now legendary open-air deck studio in the hilly woods of Marin County, California. This was an especially fortuitous moment for the original group, as it allowed students to move with their instructor through collaborative discoveries.
Simone Forti, Danze Costruzioni at L’Attico, Rome, 1968. Courtesy Archivio L’Attico-Fabio Sargentini, Rome
Relocating to New York City in the spring of 1959 was an extreme transition for Forti. After studying improvisation in close proximity to nature during her four-year apprenticeship with Halprin, Forti recalls feeling excited and also absolutely shocked to move through a place entirely made by humans. And also: “how refreshing and consoling it was to know that gravity was still gravity.” Feeling uncomfortable in New York’s cityscape, she improvised. Forti began recording new forms of motion, such as up and down buildings and through subways, devising new methods to activate and process the movement around her.
Speaking about this period during her lecture in New York, Forti demonstrated an object-placement game she remembers playing in the loft she shared with Morris just after moving to New York. Moving across the stage at Roulette with an object she had on hand, she explained how everyday objects like a roll of toilet paper and a milk carton could be used as pawns, observing decisions in space like a board game, activating relationships in space over time. Forti allied her shifting perceptions with Robert Dunn through a composition class at the Merce Cunningham Studio. Introducing her to the scores of John Cage and the concept of indeterminacy, Dunn’s class helped Forti discover new means to compose work and connected her with the people who went on to form the Judson Dance Theater.
Perhaps what is so familiar about Forti rests in the fact that movement, the thing she has committed her life to, is so much a part of her presence; movement infiltrates even her sentences, imbuing her voice with a delicate mobility that accepts the importance of timing as a means to unfold expression, activity, and even proximity. Forti’s movement practice maintains momentum, consistently transforming a network of profundities into a more spacious range of melodies.
The drawing on the cover of Handbook in Motion is an appropriated diagram Forti discovered in a book of Egyptian measuring devices soon after emerging from 1960s drug culture with an interest in harmonic vibrations. Beginning this series in the early 1970s, these drawings foreshadow Forti’s holography series, Angel, which used image material from earlier pieces such as Huddle, incorporated into holographic forms. The significance of the simple line drawings is the network of three elements: waving motion of water becomes a catalyst, moving a mirror (represented by a 90 degree angle) to reflect sunlight onto a reflective surface, projecting a cycle of motion. The logo-motion and later News Animation series Forti began soon after. We can see the network of elements synthesized in a new form, activating movement over time. The audio sample included with this text operates in a similar way: a table representing physical space is activated by touching; a radio interview vocalizes a familiarity of experience—empathy to a particular situation—bringing the more abstract notion of space and scale into view by wondering if the light outside her door is a star/a planet. Bringing all components together, Forti’s voice articulating each component seamlessly, seemingly without boundary between one thought to the next. In this form, punctuation is activated in the space of time, voice in motion like body through space—“it just made it so like touching the legs of this little table that are so gracefully tapered to hear his voice…” later followed by “she turns a somersault” become invisible boundaries in time, plucking the ear, catalyzing movement.
Simone Forti, Danze Costruzioni at L’Attico, Rome, 1968. Courtesy Archivio L’Attico-Fabio Sargentini, Rome