Simone Forti (March 25, 1935 – July 2026) was an American postmodern artist, dancer, choreographer, and writer. From the 1950s onward, she exhibited, performed, and taught workshops throughout the world. Her innovations in postmodern dance, including her seminal 1961 body of work, Dance Constructions, along with her contribution to the early Fluxus movement, have influenced many notable dancers and artists.Yvonne Rainer (2014). "On Simone Forti". In Sabine Breitwieser. Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body. University of Chicago Press. pp. 70–71. .Steve Paxton (2014). "The Emergence of Simone Forti". In Sabine Breitwieser. Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body. University of Chicago Press. pp. 59–61. .The Judson Dance Project 1980-1982. Founding members of the Experimental Modern Dance Group active in New York City's Judson Church in the 1960s discuss their work. Includes archival footage of performances. Series of 7 videocassettes, VHS (New York, The Kitchen, 1983), v. 5.
Forti first apprenticed with Anna Halprin in the 1950s and later worked alongside artists and composers Nam June Paik, Steve Paxton, La Monte Young, Trisha Brown, Charlemagne Palestine, Peter Van Riper, Dan Graham, Yoshi Wada, Robert Morris, and others.
Her published books include Handbook in Motion (1974, The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design), Angel (1978, self-published), Oh Tongue (2003, [reprinted by Nero Editions, Rome, in 2023], and Unbuttoned Sleeves (2006) Beyond Baroque Foundation, ed. Fred Dewey), and New Book (2024), published by Nero Editions. At the time of her death, she was represented by Raffaella Cortese Gallery in Milan, Italy, and her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Generali Foundation in Vienna, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.Megan Metcalf (2014). "Biography". In Sabine Breitwieser. Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body. University of Chicago Press. pp. 276–291. .
Early life Forti was born in Florence, Italy, on March 25, 1935, to Jewish parents Milka Forti (née Greunstein) and Mario Forti. In the winter of 1938, the Forti family, including Forti's older sister Anna, left Italy to escape antisemitic persecution.Bryan-Wilson, Julia. "Simone Forti Goes to the Zoo". October. No. 152, Spring 2015, p. 26–52. The family crossed the northern border into Switzerland, then spent six months in Bern while Milka was ill.Sabine Breitwieser (2014). "The Workshop Process: Sabine Breitwieser in Conversation with Simone Forti". In Sabine Breitwieser. Simone Forti: Thinking With The Body. University of Chicago Press. pp. 15–35. . When Milka recovered, the family sailed to the United States in early 1939. The Fortis eventually settled in Los Angeles, where Forti attended public schools Gardner Street Elementary School, John Burroughs Middle School, and Fairfax Senior High School. After graduating from Fairfax High School in 1953, Forti attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon from 1953 to 1955. In 1955, Forti and her partner, artist Robert Morris, left Reed College and moved to San Francisco, California. The couple married there the same year and Forti began working under the name Simone Morris.
Soon after moving to the Bay Area, Forti enrolled in classes at the Halprin-Lathrop School, co-founded by dancer/choreographer Anna Halprin. When Halprin founded the San Francisco Dancer's Workshop (formerly known as the Dancer's Workshop of Marin) in 1955, Forti followed her to continue studying Halprin's work in Dance Improvisation. Forti studied under Halprin from 1955 to 1959, during which time she contributed to early works by Halprin and around San Francisco, along with other members of the Dancer's Workshop, including A.A. Leath and John Graham. Through the Dancer's Workshop, Forti also taught children's and adult's dance workshops throughout Marin County.
Career
New York and Dance Constructions In 1959, Forti moved to New York with Morris. While also working as a nursery school teacher during the day, Forti enrolled in a composition and improvisation class at the Merce Cunningham Studio, taught by educator/musicologist Robert Ellis Dunn. These classes introduced Forti to the work of John Cage and she met and began working with dancers who later became influential in the field of Postmodern dance, including Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, and Steve Paxton.
Forti's first development of her Dance Constructions series was publicly presented at New York City's Reuben Gallery in December 1960, in an exhibition shared with Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg, titled Happenings at the Reuben Gallery. During this exhibition, Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer performed See Saw, and Forti and Patty Mucha (then Patty Oldenburg, Claes Oldenburg's then-spouse) performed Rollers (now titled Roller Boxes) with the contributions of audience members. In Thinking With the Body (2014, University of Chicago Press and Hirmer), curator Sabine Breitwieser wrote about Forti's Dance Constructions, "One could look at the Dance Constructions as problematizing everyday or, as you call them, pedestrian movements. If you take something out of an everyday context and isolate it, then it becomes something else. Using a rope to scale a steep ramp in Slant Board, for instance, evokes a typical climbing movement, but you've turned it to an isolated action that lacks a purpose, that exists just for itself."
In May 1961, Forti presented a full evening of pieces she called Five Dance Constructions & Some Other Things at Yoko Ono's studio. Performers that night included Forti, Ruth Allphon, Marni Mahaffay, Robert Morris, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and Carl Lehmann-Haupt.
These pieces proved to be influential in both the fields of dance and visual arts, and have been performed around the world since their development. Dance critic Jennifer Dunning wrote in her October 1991 New York Times review, "Simone Forti presented her first dance program in 1960 and since then has had a steadily increasing influence on post-modernist choreographers interested in exploring 'natural', or nonformalist, movement and dance." Stuart Comer, the Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at MOMA, New York, has said that the exhibitions of Dance Constructions at the Reuben Gallery and Yoko Ono's loft were "a watershed moment when the relationship between bodies and objects, movement and sculpture, was being fundamentally rethought."
Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer have cited Forti's 1961 Dance Constructions concert as a pivotal influence on their creative direction which encouraged them to establish the Judson Dance Theater, a collective of dancers, composers, and visual artists who performed at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village between 1962 and 1964.
On the exhibition of Forti's Dance Constructions, Yvonne Rainer wrote, in Simone Forti: Thinking With the Body (2014), "it seemed that a vacuum sealed that evening for over a year until her performers could get the Judson Dance Theater up and running. Simone was its inspiration and fountainhead. We all owe her."
Dancer Steve Paxton also wrote, "All I know is that this small, radical group of works by Forti was like a pebble tossed into a large, still, and complacent pond. The ripples radiated. Most notably, Forti's event happened prior to the first performance at Judson Memorial Church by the choreographers from Robert Dunn's composition class, and they took courage from it." (2014)
In December 2015, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the Dance Constructions as part of their permanent collection in the Department of Media and Performance.
Happenings In 1962, Forti and Robert Morris separated. Forti started living and working with artist Robert Whitman, and the two married in 1962. During their six-year marriage, Forti was part of Whitman's performance group and she collaborated with him on many of his Happenings. Some of these performances included American Moon (1960), Hole (1963), Flower (1963), Water (1963), Nighttime Sky (1965), and Prune Flat (1965).Mann (1998), p. 285. During this time, Simone wrote and performed under the name Simone Whitman.
After her divorce from Whitman, Forti accompanied her parents on a trip to Italy in 1968 and decided to stay and live in Rome.Patrick Steffen. "Forti On All Fours: A Talk with Simone Forti". Contact Quarterly. Vol. 37, No. 1, Winter/Spring 2012. Forti began working with gallerist Fabio Sargentini, whose gallery, L'Attico, was a gathering point for Arte Povera artists at the time. Forti showed a two-evening retrospective of Dance Constructions at L'Attico in 1968. In addition, Forti performed two of her other pieces, Bottom and Sleep Walkers (alternatively titled Zoo Mantras ).
Sleep Walkers was developed out of Forti's observations of animals at the Rome Zoo, now known as the Bioparco di Roma. Forti specifically referred to developing the movement of swinging her head back and forth and a movement called "banking" from watching polar bears' and elephants' repetitive pacing inside their enclosures.
In the essay "Animate Matter: Simone Forti in Rome" (2014), art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson writes, "In Sleepwalkers [sic], Forti takes cues from animals that develop (and continually replicate) patterns of movement in response to environments of confinement. By segmenting and then repeating small passages of movement, for instance by isolating a few steps out of the flow of the elephant's many other motions, she creates an almost musical sense of pause, interval and tempo."Julia Bryan-Wilson (2014). "Animate Matters: Simone Forti in Rome". In Sabine Breitwieser. Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body. University of Chicago Press. pp. 49–57. . Bryan-Wilson wrote further about this performance in the article "Simone Forti Goes to the Zoo", published in October (2015).
While in Rome, Forti introduced Sargentini to several Postmodern dancers and artists she had worked with in New York. Sargentini and Forti organized a dance and music festival in 1969, Danza Volo Musica Dinamite (Dance Flight Music Dynamite), in which Forti, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, David Bradshaw, and Deborah Hay, among others, performed and exhibited.
Forti performed in two more of Sargentini's festivals while going back and forth from Rome to New York, including Festival Music and Dance U.S. (1972), and Musica e danza contemporanea (1974). Other musicians and artists that performed in these festivals included Joan Jonas, Charlemagne Palestine, and La Monte Young.
Woodstock Forti moved back to New York in August 1969 to attend the Woodstock Music & Art Fair. Forti ended up staying in Woodstock, New York, for a year, living communally and experimenting with LSD, which she wrote about in her 1974 book Handbook in Motion. ́’́́
She moved back to southern California in 1970, where she started living with a group of artists associated with the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Her housemates at the time were artists Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, and musician Peter Van Riper, her future husband. The first house the artists shared was in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, and later in Piru, California.