Simone Forti

SIMONE FORTI is a dancer, choreographer, artist and writer based in Los Angeles. She started dancing in 1955 with improvisational dance pioneer Anna Halprin. In 1959 she moved to New York, where she studied composition, particularly John Cage’s work, in the Merce Cunningham Studio with musicologist Robert Dunn and familiarised herself with random practice. She met Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton and actively collaborated to initial happenings, mainly with Robert Whitman, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow while conceiving her first minimalist conceptual dance/constructions. In 1961 she presented her Dance Constructions, which influenced the emergence of the Judson Dance Theatre, which revolutionised dance in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout her prolific career Forti took an interest in the study of the movements of animals and the dynamics of circling, as well as in the natural, geographical or historical ‘portraits’ of specific venues that she created with the group Forti & Troupe that she founded in 1986. She collaborated with musicians/composers such as Charlemagne Palestine and Peter Van Riper. Since the early 1980s, Forti has been performing News Animations, a blend of movements and spoken words referring to world news. She received many awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 and the Yoko Ono Lennon Award for Courage for the Arts in 2011. Today Forti continues teaching and performing worldwide while inventing original devices to explore movement. Her work has been featured at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the MoMa in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the Louvre Museum in Paris among others.