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Simone forti

B. 1935, FLORENCE, ITALY

Simone Forti is a dancer/choreographer/writer. In 1955 she began dancing with Anna Halprin who was doing pioneering work in dance improvisation in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1960 Simone moved to New York City, where she studied composition at the Merce Cunningham Studio with musicologist/dance educator Robert Dunn who was introducing dancers to the work of John Cage. There she met choreographers including Tricia Brown, Steve Paxton and Lucinda Childs, and became a pivotal figure in the Judson Dance Theater community that revolutionized dance in NY in the 1060s and 70s. Over the years her work has evolved through various approaches. During the past several years she has been developing Logomotion, an improvisational dance narrative form wherein movement and language spontaneously weave together to explore thoughts and feelings about the world. This performance practice, and her writing, inform each other.

Forti’s Handbook in Motion: an ongoing personal discourse and its manifestations in dance was published in 1974 by The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Her book, Oh, Tongue, published in 2003 by Beyond Baroque Books (temporarily out of print), is a varied collection of writings including experimental essays, transcripts of News Animation improvisations and articles about dance.

Simone Forti is the recipient of a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship for dance and a 2011 Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts.