28 Facts About Simone Forti

Simone Forti was born on March 25,1935 and is an American postmodern artist, dancer, choreographer, and writer.

When Halprin founded the San Francisco Dancer's Workshop in 1955, Simone Forti followed her to continue studying Halprin's work in Dance Improvisation.

Simone Forti started living and working with artist Robert Whitman, and the two married in 1962.

Simone Forti began working with gallerist Fabio Sargentini, whose gallery, L'Attico, was a gathering point for Arte Povera artists at the time.

Simone Forti showed a two-evening retrospective of Dance Constructions at L'Attico in 1968.

Simone Forti specifically refers 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.

Sargentini and Simone Forti organized a dance and music festival in 1969, Danza Volo Musica Dinamite, in which Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, David Bradshaw, and Deborah Hay, among others, performed and exhibited.

Simone Forti performed in two more of Sargentini's festivals while going back and forth from Rome to New York, including Festival Music and Dance US, and Musica e danza contemporanea.

Simone 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.

Simone Forti moved back to southern California in 1970, where she started living with a group of artists associated with the California Institute of the Arts.

From 1970 to 1972, Simone Forti occasionally substituted for Allan Kaprow at CalArts, having known Kaprow from working together on Happenings in New York with her then spouse Robert Whitman.

Simone Forti initially taught at the Villa Cabrini campus in Burbank, then at CalArts' permanent location in Valencia, CA.

Simone Forti led unofficial workshops and dance and music jams called "Open Gardenia" on the CalArts campus.

Simone Forti lived in Halifax for two years, from 1972 to 1974, writing and editing Handbook in Motion.

In Handbook, Simone Forti describes several pivotal moments in her career up to that point and several of her pieces, including Herding, Face Tunes, Cloths, Fallers, and several Dance Construction pieces.

Big Room consisted of Van Riper playing music and Simone Forti simultaneously performing movements based on her observations of animals, similar to her 1968 work, Sleep Walkers.

Julia Bryan-Wilson wrote further about Simone Forti's identifying with zoos animals in 2015,.

Simone Forti was constantly aware that their movements were shaped not only by their state of captivity but by their inner reserves of strength.

In Planet, about forty people performed the movement vocabulary Simone Forti had been developing in her classes, inspired by animal movements Simone Forti observed in zoos.

Simone Forti continued teaching at SVA for four years, until 1987.

From her Logomotion work, Simone Forti developed her practice of News Animations, which is a performance that incorporates both movement and speaking.

Simone Forti continued to teach dance workshops and develop new work in her Broadway loft in the years immediately following her separation from Van Riper in 1981.

In 1986, the Yellow Springs Cultural Center in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, invited Simone Forti to perform on their campus.

The main idea behind the group was to develop what Simone Forti called "land portraits" for each location in which they performed.

In 1988, Simone Forti bought a cabin at Mad Brook Farm in East Charleston, Vermont, a small community that was settled into by a group of artists during the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s, where her longtime friend and collaborator Steve Paxton already lived.

That same year, Simone Forti began a 17-year teaching career in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures, which included courses Beginning Improvisation, Advanced Improvisation, Advanced Choreography, and Advanced Interdisciplinary Composition.

In July 2005, Simone Forti was invited to perform at the REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles as part of their annual New Original Works Festival.

An accompanying catalogue, Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body, with essays by Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Fred Dewey, Robert Morris, curator Sabine Breitwieser, Meredith Morse, and Julia Bryan-Wilson, was published in 2014 by Hirmer.