Simone Forti

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Simone Forti (born 1935 in Florence ) is an American dancer and choreographer of modern dance as well as an expressionist painter. She founded minimalism in dance and developed a new body awareness. Her dance construction Huddle from 1961 is seen as the groundbreaking piece for the development of the performance .

Simone Forti (2007)

Life

Simone Forti's father was of Jewish origin and in 1938 brought himself and the family to safety from Italian anti-Semitism and fascism . They emigrated to Switzerland and from there to the USA.

Forti grew up in Los Angeles , early married the artist Robert Morris , who worked at Reed College , where she began training in the fine arts. In 1956 the two of them moved to San Francisco , where she started dancing relatively late in Anna Halprin's “Dancer's Workshop”. In 1959 the two moved on to the east coast, where they completed their dance training a. a. at Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham in New York City . She began to experiment musically with Robert Dunn in 1960. In late 1960 she showed in the Reuben Gallery , the pieces scooter and See-Saw . The piece Huddle was later seen as the groundbreaking piece for the development of the performance. Forti was married to Robert Whitman between 1962 and 1966 and worked with him on his happenings . During this time she did not create her own work.

Simone Forti worked a. a. together with the choreographers Anna Halprin , Merce Cunningham , Martha Graham and Trisha Brown and with musicians and performers such as La Monte Young , Richard Maxfield , Charlemagne Palestine , Terry Riley and Yoko Ono .

Outside the United States, Forti has worked as a performer and teacher in Canada, Japan, Australia, Venezuela and various European countries. Her awards include the 1995 Bessie Award and a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship .

plant

Simone Forti founded minimalism in dance. In her improvisations and performances she developed a new body awareness.

In the early 1960s, Forti began working on her Dance Constructions series . They arose from the need to use my own physical discomfort to "feel something as simple and fundamental as the attraction between the bulk of my body and the earth, or because I had the desire to push, pull and climb", writes Forti 2011. In April 1961 Forti presented her groundbreaking program An Evening of Dance Constructions in Yoko Ono's huge loft in Manhattan. In the play Herding , the audience was pushed around several times by the performers, from one end of the room to the other. “This unusual performance… seemed bizarre and not crude because of its unobtrusive demonstration of limited power. So nobody protested, ”wrote her then college colleague Yvonne Rainer in 2014. Fortis dance constructions are initially short textual instructions. They are intended for more consistent pieces that do not develop, but that should be placed in the room themselves in such a way that they are like sculptures. Several pieces can be performed at the same time. Groups of dancers put the instructions into motion, with or without static aids. In the huddle dance construction, for example, the participants climb on a structure that is formed from their own bodies. In constant, but not hurrying movement, one or, by chance, two people separate from a group of seven to eight participants standing closely together, climb up the bodies of the others and back into the crowd, from where another figure emerges immediately afterwards loosens and climbs up. Approx. 10 minutes are specified as sufficient length. “One associates the pushing up of leaders. Or think of the suffocating people in the gas chambers of the death camps who, gasping for breath, tried to get air, ”wrote Eva-Elisabeth Fischer in August 2014 in her review of the exhibition in the Salzburg Museum der Moderne . Huddle is still defying a hasty interpretation, emphasizes Forti's dance colleague Steve Paxton from the joint group of the Judson Dance Theater , to which Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown also belonged. They appeared in a metaphor-free zone because Forti did not provide any pictures. Steve Paxton recalls in 2014 that she brought a completely new attitude to the world of dance: "It was a shock for the viewer to be denied a meaning with which they could have classified the experience of such an artistic project."

In the performance Cloth from 1967, the performers hide behind large frames covered with fabric. It's all about singing, whereby the voices intertwine tonally and, when one stops, another can suddenly be on its own. "The piece conveys a nudity and a shyness towards the social component of the situation," Tashi Wada describes the effect.

In her pieces from the News Animation series , Forti takes linguistic images from news texts literally, for example “in a misalignment” to denote the situation of a society, and works out how “the actual is channeled through the body and all its parts,” writes Fred Dewey 2014.

Forti's painting style is expressionistic. She sees dancing and painting as similar. Eva-Elisabeth Fischer describes the effect of one of her pictures in connection with her father's foresight to bring the family to safety in 1938 from the fascists in 1938: “Forti with her father at the side on the street, she is fed up with color after a photo painted. It is an image that comes very close. "

Forti has already read from her latest volume, The Bear in the Mirror (forthcoming). It is an experimental mosaic in which Forti explores, among other things, what options there are to write about the generations of her family.

Fonts (selection)

  • Handbook in Motion: An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse and its Manifestations in Dance , Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia 1974 (Forti's first artist's book, 2nd, expanded edition 1980, expanded edition in French , Brussels 2000)
  • “Texts and Works by the Artist”, pp. 79–275, in: Simone Forti. Thinking with the Body , edited by Sabine Breitwieser for the Museum der Moderne Salzburg . Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-7774-2277-0 .

literature

  • Simone Forti. Thinking with the Body , edited by Sabine Breitwieser for the Museum der Moderne (Salzburg). Table of contents Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-7774-2277-0 , English-language edition ISBN 978-3-7774-2278-7 (This catalog volume contains 8 articles on Simone Forti's work and a comprehensive bibliography on pp. 279–284 with works by and about Simone Forti. It contains around 50 articles by Forti in specialist journals, around 25 interviews with her, and 9 essays by others who deal specifically with some of her works. The volume also contains a list of all of the individual works - and group exhibitions by Simone Forti.)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Eva-Elisabeth Fischer: Anarchy of omission , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , 23 August 2014, p. 12
  2. ^ Simone Forti: Handbook in Motion . Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax 1974, p. 35 f.
  3. ^ A b Lisa Anderson Mann: "Simone Forti", in: International Dictionary of Modern Dance . Edited by Taryn Benbow-Count Palatine. St. James, Detroit 1998, pp. 285-289
  4. ^ A b Simone Forti: "Die Dance Constructions " (2011), in: Simone Forti. Thinking with the Body , edited by Sabine Breitwieser for the Museum der Moderne Salzburg . Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2014, p. 80
  5. ^ Yvonne Rainer: "About Simone Forti", in: Simone Forti. Thinking with the Body , edited by Sabine Breitwieser for the Museum der Moderne. Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2014, pp. 70–72
  6. ↑ Simone Forti: "5 pieces ..." (1961), in: Simone Forti. Thinking with the Body , 2014, p. 83
  7. ^ A b Steve Paxton: “Simone Forti enters the world of dance”, in: Simone Forti. Thinking with the Body , edited by Sabine Breitwieser for the Museum der Moderne. Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2014, pp. 59–61
  8. ↑ “Simone Forti and Sound. Liz Kotz in conversation with Tashi Wada “(February 3, 2014), in: Simone Forti. Thinking with the Body , edited by Sabine Breitwieser for the Museum der Moderne. Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-7774-2277-0 , pp. 63-69.
  9. ↑ Fred Dewey: "Embodying the World", in: Simone Forti. Thinking with the Body , edited by Sabine Breitwieser for the Museum der Moderne. Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-7774-2277-0 , pp. 73-76. (About the making of the tape Oh, Tounge )
  10. ^ Announcement of a reading in Brooklyn, New York , patch.com
personal data
SURNAME Forti, Simone
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Morris, Simone; Whitman, Simone
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American dancer and choreographer
DATE OF BIRTH 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Florence