Dance Construction - Scramble

Before moving to New York in 1959, choreographer Simone Forti spent four heady, formative years in San Francisco. There, she trained with the postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin, who rejected the stylistic constraints of ballet and modern dance. On Halprin’s outdoor dance deck in wooded Marin County, Forti explored improvisation, her motions guided  by a keen alertness to the body’s anatomy. She also organized open-work sessions with her then husband, the Minimalist artist Robert Morris,  gathering artists for communal, multidisciplinary explorations of movement, objects, sound, and light. 

At the end of the decade, Forti and Morris moved east. In New York, she began developing the pieces she eventually called Dance Constructions: dances based around ordinary movement, chance, and simple objects like rope and plywood boards. First performed in 1960 at the Reuben Gallery in Soho, and then in Yoko Ono’s loft the following year, they marked “a  watershed moment when the relationship between bodies and objects, movement and sculpture, was being fundamentally rethought,” says Stuart  Comer, Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art. Dancers balanced on seesaws, embraced in a huddle of bodies, and stood still in hanging  loops of rope. They needed only to abide Forti’s “rule games” but were  otherwise free to improvise gestures as they negotiated the object  before them. Per Forti’s principles, these gestures were “pedestrian,” lacking the arch stylization and technical finesse of traditional dance forms. In doing so, as Morris later noted, these pieces “attacked the  notion of dance as a format that required the trained body of the dancer.”

Over the past half-century, Forti’s seven Dance Constructions have been performed by dancers around the world.

Source: website of the MoMa museum / New York