Simone Forti, dancer/choreographer/writer, was born in Florence, Italy, in 1935 and emigrated to the United States with her family in 1939. In 1955 she began dancing in the San Francisco Bay Area with Anna Halprin, who was doing pioneering work in improvisation. After four years of studying and performing with Halprin, Simone moved to New York City. There she studied composition at the Merce Cunningham Studio with musicologist/dance educator Robert Dunn who was introducing dancers to the work of John Cage. In the spring of 1961, Forti presented a full evening at Yoko Ono’s loft, of what she called Dance Constructions, a seminal event that proved to be influential in both the world of contemporary dance and of visual art.
Over the years Forti’s work has evolved from the early minimalist Dance Constructions, through animal movement studies, explorations of circling in her work with musician Charlemagne Palestine, and group works such as Land Portraits with Simone Forti and Troupe. In the 1980s Forti started speaking while moving, developing her improvisational practice, News Animations.
Forti has performed and taught throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe as well as in the United Kingdom, Turkey, Japan, Korea, Australia and Venezuela. Her appearances have included the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Italy, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Saibu Theater in Tokyo, Fondation Cartier and the Louvre Museum in Paris, Galleria L’Attico, Castello di Rivoli Museum, Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Italy, the Fundacao Serralves museum in Portugal and the ICA in London. In the U.S. she has appeared in many Los Angeles venues including the Church in Ocean Park, Pasadena Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Highways Performance Space, The Electric Lodge, Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, and REDCAT; in New York, at Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace/St. Marks Church, Judson Church, The Kitchen Center for Video, Music, Dance & Performance, the Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1. She participated in Nam June Paik’s Video Opera at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Donaueschinger Festival in Germany, and the Sougetsu Museum in Tokyo.
Many of Forti’s works are in permanent collections, including her Dance Constructions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, holograms created in collaboration with holographer Lloyd Cross at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Museum in New York. Her drawings are in many private collections.
Forti has collaborated with artists Robert Morris, Robert Whitman, musicians Charlemagne Palestine, Peter Van Riper, Jon Gibson, Malcolm Goldstein and Zev, and with dancers Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Claire Filmon, Carmela Hermann Dietrich, Jeremiah Day, Batyah Schachter, Terrence Luke Johnson, Sarah Swenson, Pooh Kaye, K. J. Holmes, David Zambrano, and many others.
Forti has taught at the American Dance Festival in North Carolina, the Bates Festival in Maine, the Center for New Dance Development in The Netherlands, and the Centre National de la Danse in France. She was on the dance faculty of UCLA from 1997 to 2014.
Forti’s first book, Handbook in Motion: an account of an ongoing personal discourse and its manifestations in dance, was originally published in 1974 by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design as part of their Source Materials of the Contemporary Arts series. It was re-published in French translation, as Manuel en Mouvement, in 2000 by Contredanse as an edition of their Belgian dance journal Nouvelles de Danse. The first edition of Forti’s book, Oh, Tongue was published in 2003 by Beyond Baroque Books, Los Angeles, edited by Fred Dewey. It is a varied collection of writings, including experimental essays, transcripts of logomotion improvisations, an imaginary political/historical conversation with her father, poetry, articles about dance and a postscript by the poet Jackson Mac Low. In 2008 Oh, Tongue was republished in French translation by Editions Al Dante, Limoge, France, together with the Geneva University of Art and Design. In 2010 Beyond Baroque Books published an expanded edition of Oh, Tongue, which included some of Forti’s new writings and drawings, and an afterward by its editor, Fred Dewey, which is an extensive reflection on and contextualization of Simone’s work. Oh, Tongue was reprinted by Nero Editions, Rome, in 2022. In 2021, Nero Editions, Rome, Italy, published News Animations, in English and Italian, a collection of transcriptions of Forti’s News Animations performances over seversal decades. In 2018 Koenig Books and Vleeshal, Middelburg co-published The Bear In The Mirror, a collection of stories, prose-poems, drawings, photos, letters, notes, and memories. In 2021 Kunstverein published the Italian translation, L’Orso allo Specchio. In 2014, the Museum der Modern, Salzburg Austria, published their catalog for Forti’s retrospective exhibit, Thinking With the Body. In 2009, Forti’s work appeared in Jeremiah Day/Simone Forti, a book documenting a 2008 show with Jeremiah Day at Project Arts Centre in Dublin, with essays by Fred Dewey and Centre curator Tessa Giblin.
Forti is the recipient of several awards, including a New York State Council on the Arts Grant for Choreography in 1988, a Bessie Award for Sustained Achievement from Dance Theater Workshop in 1995, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2005, the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage in the Arts award in 2011, and in 2023, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from LA Biennale Danza.
Simone Forti is represented by the Galleria Raffaella Cortese in Milan, and the Box Gallery Los Angeles in the United States.