Simone Forti

Simone Forti (born 1935), is an American Italian Postmodern artist, dancer, choreographer, and writer. Since the 1950's, Forti has exhibited, performed, and taught workshops all over the world, including performances at the Louvre in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. 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 artists, including dancer/artist Yvonne Rainer and the Judson Dance Theater in New York. Forti first apprenticed with Anna Halprin in the 1950s and has since worked alongside artists and composers Nam June Paik, Steve Paxton, La Monte Young, Trisha Brown, Charlemagne Palestine, Peter Van Riper, Dan Graham, Yoshi Wada, and Robert Morris, among many others. Forti's published books include Handbook in Motion (1974, The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design), Angel (1978, self-published), and Oh Tongue (2003, Beyond Baroque Foundation, ed. Fred Dewey). She is currently represented by The Box L.A. in Los Angeles, CA, and has works 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.

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 anti-Semitic persecution. After leaving Italy, the family crossed the northern border into Switzerland, then spent 6 months in Bern while Milka was ill. The Forti family then moved to the United States in early 1939, after Milka recovered. Forti spoke about this emigration in an interview with curator Sabine Breitwieser, published in 2014: "After crossing the border to Switzerland, we spent six months in Bern. I think we stayed at a hotel, and my mother was in the hospital because she got very sick...When she was well enough, we traveled through France–which must have been dangerous at that time–to Le Havre, where we boarded the SS Nieuw Amsterdam and sailed to New York." 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 – 1955.

Working with Anna Halprin
In 1955, Forti and her partner, artist Robert Morris, decided to leave Reed College and move to San Francisco, California. The couple married in San Francisco that 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 pioneering work in Dance Improvisation. Forti studied under Halprin from 1955 – 1959, during which time Forti contributed to early works by Halprin and performed these works 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.

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 held at the Merce Cunningham Studio, taught by educator/musicologist Robert Ellis Dunn. In these classes, which introduced Forti to the work of John Cage, Forti met and began working with dancers that 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 Forti 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 Roller Boxes (then titled Rollers) 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.

The original Dance Construction pieces presented at Yoko Ono's studio were Huddle, See Saw, Platforms, Hangers, Slant Board, From Instructions, and Accompaniment for La Monte's 2 sounds and La Monte's 2 sounds, a piece that incorporated the music of La Monte Young. The pieces referred to as "Some Other Things" were Censor, Herding, and Paper Demon. Eventually, the pieces that were identified as the complete series of Forti's Dance Constructions were Huddle, See Saw, Platforms, Hangers, Slant Board, From Instructions, Roller Boxes, and Accompaniment for La Monte's 2 sounds and La Monte's 2 sounds (also sometimes included in this list is Censor).

These pieces proved to be influential in both the fields of dance and visual arts, and have been performed around the world for exhibitions since their development. Dance critic Jennifer Dunning wrote in her Oct. 27, 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 purchased the Dance Constructions as part of their permanent collection.

Happenings
In 1962, Forti and Robert Morris separated. Forti started living and working with artist Robert Whitman, and the two married. During their six year marriage from 1962 to 1968, 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). During this time, Simone wrote and performed under the name Simone Whitman.

Rome
After her divorce from Whitman, Forti accompanied her mother and father on a trip to Italy in 1968, deciding to stay and live in Rome. 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, titled Danze-costruzioni e altri danze, pezzi di Simona Forti (Dance Constructions and other Dance Pieces by Simone Forti). In addition to the Dance Constructions, 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 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, writing, "I remember first watching the polar bear swinging its head...It seemed to me that the bear was taking care of itself in a way that I could understand... That bear, whose genetic makeup keeps it ranging at great distances over frozen lands, was in a small enclosure in the Rome Zoo... In every bear, gorilla, or person, there's an ability to retain the essence of one's nature regardless of how much the pattern of one's life system has been fractured or taken away."

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." Bryan-Wilson wrote further about this moment of Forti's life in the article "Simone Forti Goes to the Zoo", published in October (2015):

"While in Rome, Forti immersed herself in observing animals at the zoo, using her drawings of them walking, pivoting, rolling, rocking, eating, and swaying as source material for her own investigations about anatomy, ritual movement, gravitational forces, and limberness. Her animal drawings, with their lively lines, show her attempt to transcribe in graphite and ink the pliability of animal bodies, to capture how the relationships among their parts can fluidly change with every gesture, sometimes making indications (as in the circular arrow that traces the "sinuous" flip of a sea lion) of their vectors of activity. As the animals interacted with each other and with their surroundings, Forti would often scribble notes to herself, describing the behaviors, relationships, and bodies she observed, and making marks such as lines that curve around an ox's torso to indicate how breathing expands the animal's chest. The durational and physical medium of drawing was crucial to this project, as it allowed her hand and arm to enact movements similar to those she was recording..."

During her time working with Sargentini 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 and other hallucinogenic drugs, which she wrote about in her 1974 book Handbook in Motion.

Illuminations work with Charlemagne Palestine
After her year of living in Woodstock, Simone moved back to southern California in 1970, where she started living with a group of artists associated with the California Institute of the Arts. Her housemates at the time were artists Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, and musician Peter Van Riper, who would eventually become Forti's husband. The first house the artists shared was in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, then they moved to Piru, CA.

From 1970–1972, Forti occasionally substituted for Allan Kaprow at the California Institute of the Arts h(CalArts), having known Kaprow from working together on Happenings in New York with her then spouse Robert Whitman. Forti initially taught at the Villa Cabrini campus in Burbank, then at CalArts' permanent location in Valencia, CA. Forti also led unofficial workshops and dance and music jams called "Open Gardenia" on the CalArts campus. At this time, Forti began her life-long Tai Chi practice, studying with Tai Chi master Marshall Ho'o. Forti began collaborating with musician/composer Charlemagne Palestine, who was also working with artists associated with CalArts. Forti described meeting Palestine in an interview by curator Sabine Breitwieser: "We met in 1970 at CalArts [California Institute of the Arts] in Los Angeles because La Monte Young asked us to arrange a concert for the raga singing master Pandit Pran Nath. I was just coming from a year in Woodstock, where I had lived very much in a hippy culture. I was getting away from that and looking for a musician to work with...So I proposed to Charlemagne that we try to see if we work well together, and it clicked right away. It was good for both of us."

Together, Forti and Palestine developed a performance practice titled Illuminations, which they have performed internationally since 1971 as an ongoing process, including a staging at the Louvre in 2014.

Handbook In Motion
In 1972, the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design invited Forti to Halifax to write a book, as part of their collection, The Nova Scotia Series - Source Materials of the Contemporary Arts. Other artists who have published books in this series include Steve Reich, Bernhard Leitner, Claes Oldenburg, and Yvonne Rainer. Forti lived in Halifax for two years, from 1972 - 1974, writing and editing her first published book, Handbook in Motion (1974). In Handbook, Forti describes several pivotal moments in her career up to that point, including her experiences at Woodstock, life in Rome, studying with Merce Cunningham, working with Charlemagne Palestine, observing the movement of animals, studying Tai Chi, learning from Pran Nath, and several of her pieces, including Herding, Face Tunes, Cloths, Fallers, and several Dance Construction pieces, among others. The book also contains photographs, poems, and drawings, as well as copied pages from Forti's journals and notebooks.

Handbook in Motion has been translated into French and has been published in 2nd and 3rd editions in English.

Big Room with Peter Van Riper
After finishing Handbook in Motion, Forti returned to New York in the Spring of 1974. There, she began a relationship with artist/musician Peter Van Riper, who had been Forti's housemate while working in the CalArts scene from 1970-1972. Forti and Van Riper were married at the end of 1974, and lived together in SoHo in a Fluxhouse Co-Operative loft on Broadway, an artist live-work complex organized by architect, urban planner, and founding Fluxus artist, George Maciunas.

Forti and Van Riper began collaborating on a dance and music performance practice, titled Big Room (alternatively titled Home Base) in 1975. Big Room consisted of Van Riper playing music (typically on a saxophone) and Forti simultaneously performing movements based on her observations of animals, similar to her 1968 work, Sleep Walkers (alternatively titled Zoo Mantras). In Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (1977), Sally Banes wrote that Big Room "creates a sense of mutual play between the two, a sense of trust and shared exploration, relying on preferences of the moment while paying attention to the present needs of the partner."

Forti and Van Riper performed Big Room from 1975–1980, in locations including University of California Berkeley Art Museum (Berkeley, 1975), The Western Front (Vancouver, 1975), Lincoln Center (New York, 1976), St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery (New York, 1976), The Kitchen (New York, 1976), P.S.1 (Long Island City, 1977), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 1976), Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center (Buffalo, 1978), Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA) (Los Angeles, 1978), and the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux (Bordeaux, 1980), among many others.

Holography
In 1976, Van Riper introduced Forti to physicist and artist Lloyd Cross, who was developing pioneering work in holography in San Francisco at the time. Together, Forti and Cross made several integral holograms (also called a multiplex hologram), a type of hologram that incorporates cinematography to produce a three-dimensional image that appears to move. The integral holograms Forti and Cross made together used imagery of Forti performing solo, except for Huddle (1977), which shows a small group of people performing a Huddle (one of Forti's Dance Construction pieces). The holograms are exhibited in cylindrical form with a light source coming from underneath.

The integral holograms Forti and Cross made together were first exhibited in 1978 at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York, in an exhibition titled Simone Forti: Movement Holograms. On exhibition at Sonnabend were integral holograms Angel (1977), Striding/Crawling (1977), Figure 8 (1977), Planet in Retrograde (1977), Dancer (1977), Harmonics (1977), and Bug Jump (1977).

These integral holograms continue to be exhibited worldwide. The hologram Striding/Crawling is owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of their permanent collection. The hologram Angel (1977) is owned by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Planet at P.S.1
While back in New York, Forti continued to research the movements of animals in captivity, as she had been doing at the Bioparco di Roma. Forti wrote about this research in Avalanche (1974): "I went to the Central Park Zoo to see if there were any dancers...the three Grizzlys [sic] who were at first asleep bunched together awoke and became playful with the human spectators. The three lumbered back and forth at the fence, milling in and out among each other and doing a movement which made me single out this trip to the zoo as worth reporting... On my last visit to the Bronx Zoo I had occasion to speak with a man who works there in the zoo hospital. I told him that I was a dancer and interested in observing any behavior in animals which seemed to be related to dancing... I want to say that the zoo man's citing boredom as being the condition for the pacing struck a note with me that indeed I was getting closer to the essence of a life process which I felt that through my dancing I shared with these animals." Julia Bryan-Wilson wrote further about Forti's identifying with zoos animals in an article published in October (2015):

"Rather than turning to animals for a model of 'natural' liberation, Forti came to them out of despair, a shared sense of dislocation, loneliness, and isolation. At the same time, she did not neglect their adaptability, attending closely to their moments of connection and collective recreation. She was constantly aware that their movements were shaped not only by their state of captivity but also by their inner reserves of strength. She mentions, for instance, 'the big cats' compulsive pacing at the fence, which seemed to provide a modicum of relief, and writes that it gave her 'a new view of what it was that I was doing when I was dancing.' Movement is, for the animals as well as for her, a method of control and redirected awareness: 'At times I've escaped an oppressive sense of fragmentation by plunging my consciousness into cyclical momentum.'"

Forti's continued interest in these captive animals' movements developed into the large group performance Planet, first performed in 1976 at P.S.1, as part of the exhibition, The Institute for Art and Urban Resources presents Group Works by Simone Forti at P.S.1. In Planet, about forty people performed the movement vocabulary Forti had been developing in her classes, inspired by animal movements Forti observed at the Rome, Bronx, and Central Park Zoo s. Performers included David Appel, Sally Banes, Pooh Kaye, and Terrence O'Reilly, among others. Peter Van Riper performed live music. In Terpsichore in Sneakers, Banes identified some of the animals performed by a few dancers: "several performers did animal movements – including a bird (Pooh Kaye), a lion (Forti), an elephant (Sally Banes), a monkey (David Appel), three young bears (Anne Hammel, David Appel, Pooh Kaye), and lizards (Terry O'Reilly, David Taylor)."

Logomotion and News Animations
The School of Visual Arts, New York, hired Forti as an instructor of Performance Art in 1983. She continued teaching at SVA for four years, until 1987. During this period, Forti developed a new type of performance called Logomotion, an improvisational dance practice that involves both movement and speaking. The first public performance of Logomotion took place at the SVA in May 1986 (this performance is alternatively titled as the first News Animation performance ). In Contact Quarterly, Forti wrote about the development of Logomotion: "In 1985 I started developing a dance/narrative form with words and movement springing spontaneously from a common source. It's been a way for me to know what's on my mind. What's on my mind before I think it through, while it's still a wild feeling in my bones. The thoughts and images seem to flash through my motor centers and my verbal centers simultaneously, mixing and animating both speech and physical embodiment. Spatial, structural, emotional. I've come to call this Logomotion. I see it as a performance form, and as a practice."

Forti has performed Logomotion both as a solo performance as well as a group performance, often with dancer Carmela Hermann, Claire Filmon, or Batyah Schachter, or the members of Simone Forti & Troupe, an ensemble Forti formed with four of her students in 1986.

From her Logomotion work, Forti developed her practice of News Animations, which is also a performance that incorporates both movement and speaking. With New Animations, Forti focuses on speaking about contemporary issues present in news media, including politics, climate change, and social issues. In a 2012 interview for Contact Quarterly, Forti described her development of News Animations: "I started doing News Animations as a way of trying to understand the news. I still read the newspapers a lot, and the news on-line and listen to the radio. And I do improvisations, moving and speaking, playing off of the questions and feelings I have about what I'm hearing... I don't want to be didactic or to pretend I have the answers but more to open a window on my questions, my speculations, my fears, my sadness, my angers, even if I don't tend to be angry. Even looking at the situation in the world right now with the destabilization or the new stabilization in north Africa, I feel it more physically, almost like tension or a shift of energy."

Forti has performed News Animations in numerous venues across the world since 1986, including a 2012 performance at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, Los Angeles, CA, as part of Made in L.A. 2012: Los Angeles Biennial.

Simone Forti & Troupe
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 Forti to perform on their campus. Forti asked four of her workshop students at the time, K.J. Holmes, Lauri Nagel, David Rosenmiller, and David Zambrano, to perform with her at Yellow Springs. This group of five dancers formed an ensemble, Simone Forti & Troupe. The original lineup of dancers performed together until 1989, when Eric Schoefer joined the ensemble, and David Rosenmiller left. Simone Forti & Troupe performed group pieces in multiple cities across the United States from 1986–1991.

The main idea behind the group was to develop what Forti called "land portraits" for each location in which they performed. About this idea, Forti wrote, "...we mainly focus on land portraits. Going to different locations, spending time in the environment, reading about the social and natural history of the area, letting these kinds of information influence our dancing, our improvising. One of us, David Rosenmiller, knew a great deal about geology. Our land portraits always included a choreographed reenactment of how the land in that spot had moved and formed, indeed, was still moving."

In a review of Touch, an outdoor Simone Forti & Troupe performance that took place at the Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Center in the Bronx, New York, dance critic Jennifer Dunning wrote, "Artistry, weather and the environment all came together to make a spellbinding event at Wave Hill in the Riverdale section of the Bronx early Saturday evening, when Forti and Troupe presented the world premiere of Simone Forti's Touch...Forti's teaching and choreography have had a great influence on the younger choreographers coming up today. And Touch was a perfect instance of her gift not just for dance that springs from natural impulse, but for highly sophisticated, adroit timing and scene-setting...At one point, Forti talked with witty sweetness about the formation of the Palisades beyond, weaving geological and present human history."

The group also often incorporated live drawing into their performances, such as with the piece To Be Continued, performed at St. Mark's Church on April 16 and April 19, 1991. Of the live drawing, Forti wrote, "For us, the drawing of the objects was a bridge, and as we came to be intimate with the drawing, it worked as an analogy. If we could draw what we saw, we could 'body move' what we saw, with all the kinetic stimulation that can come from the developing page now coming from our movement in itself and in its relationship to its source: a torn box, a balcony of repeating arches, a corner where steam pipes disappear into the wall."

Mad Brook Farm
In 1988, 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 1960's, where her longtime friend and collaborator Steve Paxton already lived. About Mad Brook, Kent De Spain, author of Landscape of the Now: A Topography of Movement Improvisation, wrote in 2014, "Steve Paxton is the venerated mountaintop guru of movement improvisation, only in his case the mountaintop is across a small valley from his cozy cabin (with gorgeous attached studio and well-tended garden) at Mad Brook Farm in northern Vermont. Once also the home of Deborah Hay and Simone Forti, and still the home of Lisa Nelson and Paxton, Mad Brook (in my limited experience) seems to have grown from a communal past into more of an anarchic cooperative present."

Forti wrote about living in East Charleston in "About the News Animations", an essay in the book Jeremiah Day/Simone Forti (2009, Project Press): "When I moved to rural Vermont, my impressions of the news began to mix together with impressions of the Milky Way and of bear tracks along the brook. The richly physical activity of gardening encourages daydream speculations and I was fascinated with the strategies of certain plants, especially the herbs, to take over their neighbors' territories." Forti lived at Mad Brook Farm for ten years, while also traveling to teach and perform. At Mad Brook Farm, Forti developed the group performance piece Green Mountain with her ensemble, Simone Forti & Troupe, which was performed at the Dance Theater Workshop in New York, NY, in 1988.

Work in Los Angeles
After living at Mad Brook Farm for ten years, Forti returned to Los Angeles in 1998 to be with and help care for her mother Milka.

That same year, 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.

Forti also taught a series of "Movement/Language" workshops at the Church In Ocean Park in Santa Monica, and invited a nucleus of students that attended those workshops (Jeremiah Day, Carmela Hermann, Lisa Bruno, and Dana Hirsh) to perform a dance improv piece (Open Air Improvisation) with her at the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in 2002, calling the ensemble of dancers "5".

After this 2002 performance, Forti began attending workshops and giving performances and readings at Beyond Baroque, and developed a friendship and working relationship with writer/editor Fred Dewey, Beyond Baroque's Director at the time. In 2003, Dewey edited and published Forti's book Oh,Tongue on Beyond Baroque's publishing imprint, Beyond Baroque Foundation. Oh, Tongue would eventually be published in French and have 2nd and 3rd editions published in English.

In July 2005, Forti was invited to perform at the REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater) in downtown Los Angeles as part of their annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival. With collaborators writer/improv artist Terrence Luke Johnson, dancer/choreographer Sarah Swenson, and musician/composer Douglas Wadle, Forti performed the dance/theater piece Unbuttoned Sleeves. Forti, Johnson, Swenson, and Wadle called their small ensemble "The Sleeves", and collaboratively published the book Unbuttoned Sleeves on the Beyond Baroque Foundation imprint in 2006. The Sleeves created and performed four additional dance/theater pieces together around Los Angeles: "101" (2006) at Highways Performance Space, Turtles All The Way Down at The Unknown Theater(2007), To Borrow Salt (2009) at The Box Gallery Chinatown, and Conversation Piece (2010) at Highways Performance Space.

Jeremiah Day, Fred Dewey, and Simone Forti traveled to London together in May 2009 to attend and perform at the book launch party for Jeremiah Day/Simone Forti (2009, Project Press), a book that was developed from the exhibition Simone Forti/Jeremiah Day "News Animations"/"No Words For You, Springfield'", which ran from March 27 to May 3, 2008, at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin. At the launch party, Forti and Day performed a News Animation together, and Dewey gave a reading. Forti, Day, and Dewey performed and exhibited several more times together as a trio from 2009–2015, including at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMOA) in 2014 and at Errant Bodies in Berlin, Germany, in 2012.

Dewey introduced Forti to Mara McCarthy, director of The Box L.A. gallery and daughter of artist Paul McCarthy, in 2009. Forti and McCarthy planned Forti's first exhibition at The Box L.A. that year, Work In A Range of Mediums, the opening of which was preceded by a performance of To Borrow Salt by The Sleeves ensemble (Forti, Terrence Luke Johnson, Sarah Swenson, and Douglas Wadle). Since 2009, Forti has been represented by The Box L.A. and has had several solo exhibitions and performances there.

Forti's first large-scale career retrospective exhibition took place in 2014 at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg. 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.

Awards and achievements

 * 1976 - New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) CAPS Grant
 * 1976 - U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Grant for Choreography
 * 1980 - U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Choreographer's Fellowship
 * 1985 - Australia Council Theatre Board Award
 * 1988 - New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Grant for Choreography
 * 1995 - Dance Theater Workshop's New York Dance and Performance Award (also known as the "Bessie" Award) for Sustained Achievement
 * 2003 - Lester Horton Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the Dance Resource Center of Los Angeles
 * 2005 - John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship: Creative Arts - Choreography
 * 2008 - Choreographers in Mentorship and Exchange (CHIME) Grant, Los Angeles
 * 2011 - Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts
 * 2015 - Anonymous Was A Woman Award

1960

 * See Saw
 * Rollers (alternatively titled as Roller Boxes)
 * Demon

1961

 * Slant Board
 * Huddle
 * Hangers
 * Platforms
 * Accompaniment for La Monte's 2 sounds and La Monte's 2 sounds
 * From Instructions
 * Censor
 * Herding
 * Paper Demon

1967

 * Face Tunes
 * Cloths
 * Elevation Tune No. 2
 * Song
 * Two At Once
 * Bottom

1968

 * Book
 * Fallers
 * Sleep Walkers (alternatively titled as Sleepwalkers or Zoo Mantras)
 * Largo Argentina (video)
 * Grizzly Bears (video)

1969

 * Throat Dance

1970

 * Scramble

1971

 * Buzzing
 * Illuminations (performed with Charlemagne Palestine)
 * Folk Dance
 * Hippie Gospel Songs

1972

 * Crawling

1974

 * Bird's Dance Studies
 * Numbers

1975

 * Big Room (performed with Peter Van Riper)
 * Red Green
 * Zero (performed with Terry O'Reilly and Pooh Kaye)

1976

 * Planet
 * Angel (integral hologram)
 * Some Images (multimedia installation)
 * Crawling With Stories
 * Fan Dance
 * Green Green
 * Tokyo Dance Festival (video)
 * This (video)

1977

 * Paper Piece
 * Two Inches
 * Statues (video)
 * Sound and Movement (performed with Peter Van Riper)
 * Performance Number Nine (performed with Peter Van Riper)
 * Movements (integral hologram)
 * For You (performed with Terry O'Reilly and Peter Van Riper)
 * Striding/Crawling (integral hologram)
 * Figure 8 (integral hologram)
 * Planet in Retrograde (integral hologram)
 * Dancer (integral hologram)
 * Harmonics (integral hologram)
 * Huddle (integral hologram)
 * Bug Jump (integral hologram)

1978

 * Banking (alternatively titled Bicycles)
 * Garden
 * Circling I/II
 * Fountain
 * Phoenix
 * Waking the Forest (alternatively titled Molimo)

1979

 * Home Base
 * New Dance/New Music (performed with Peter Van Riper)
 * Proceeding
 * Estuary: A Nature Fantasy
 * Umi Aui Owe (performed with Peter Van Riper)
 * Day Night
 * Six
 * Twig
 * Turning in Place
 * Crescent Roll

1981

 * Jackdaw Songs (performed with Peter Van Riper and Steve Paxton)

1982

 * Door Studies
 * Asymmetry 222 (performed with Steve Paxton)

1983

 * Spring (performed with Susan Rethorst and Z'EV)
 * Board Game/Animal Stories (collaboration with Susan Rethorst)

1984

 * Full Moves
 * 180 Degrees (collaboration with Joan Logue and composer Tod Machover)
 * Face
 * Night Walk

1986

 * Logomotion
 * News Animations
 * The Foothills (Simone Forti & Troupe performance)
 * Roadcut (Simone Forti & Troupe performance)
 * News Animation: Mad Brook Farm (video)

1988

 * Green Mountain (Simone Forti & Troupe performance)

1989

 * Touch
 * Dive In

1990

 * Animation

1991

 * To Be Continued
 * Still Life

1996

 * Still Life With Framing Music

1998

 * Small Dance for Big Music (performed with Charlemagne Palestine)

2000

 * Binding (performed with Eric Schofer)
 * Turtles, Interlude, Larousse (performed with Claire Filmon and Carmela Hermann)
 * Tree Improvisation (video)

2002

 * Open Air Improvisation (performed with members of "5" group – Jeremiah Day, Carmela Hermann, Lisa Bruno, Dana Hirsh, and Simone Forti.)
 * Be Orators (performed with Tom Young)
 * Oh, Langue (performed with Claire Filmon, Karim Zabar, Said Si Mohammed, Garrett List)
 * War & Variations (performed with Terrence Luke Johnson and Dale Eunson)

2003

 * Structured Improvisation (performed with Eric Schoefer and Leah Stein)

2005

 * Deep Feelers (performed with Pauline Oliveros and the Brooklyn Adult Recorder Choir (BARC)
 * Unbuttoned Sleeves (performed with Terence Luke Johnson, Sarah Swenson, and Douglas Wadle)

2006

 * 101 (performed with Terence Luke Johnson, Sarah Swenson, and Douglas Wadle)

2007

 * Turtles All The Way Down (performed with the members of "The Sleeves" ensemble – Terrence Luke Johnson, Sarah Swenson, Douglas Wadle, and Simone Forti)

2009

 * To Borrow Salt (performed with The Sleeves)

2010

 * Conversation Piece (performed with The Sleeves)

2012

 * That Fish is Broke (performed with Terrence Luke Johnson and Brennan Gerard)

2013

 * Zuma News (video)
 * Nonsense (performed with Terrence Luke Johnson)

2014

 * Icebergs (performed with Tashi Wada and Rae Shao-Lan)

2015

 * Flag in the Water (video)
 * Flowers and Vessel (performed with Oguri and Roxanne Steinberg)

2016

 * Journey Dream Flower (performed with Oguri)

Teaching

 * 1959–1960 Ann Halprin's Marin Dance Co-op, Marin County, CA.
 * 1964–1965 Temple Emanu-El School, New York, NY.
 * 1970–1972 California Institute for the Arts, Valencia, CA.
 * 1972–1974 Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, NS.
 * 1974 Mount Saint University, Halifax, NS.
 * 1980–2014 Movement Research, New York, NY.
 * 1983–1987 School of Visual Arts, New York, NY.
 * 1987–1994 Theater School and Center for New Dance Development.
 * 1987–1989 American Dance Festival, Durham, NC.
 * 1997–2014 University of California Los Angeles, Department of World Arts and Cultures, Los Angeles, CA.

Books by Simone Forti

 * Ed. Dewey, Fred. Oh Tongue (2nd ed.). Venice, CA: Beyond Baroque Foundation. 2010.
 * With Day, Jeremiah. Simone Forti/Jeremiah Day. Venice, CA: Project Press. 2009.
 * With Johnson, Terrence Luke, Sarah Swenson, and Douglas Wadle. Unbuttoned Sleeves. Venice, CA: Beyond Baroque Foundation. 2006.
 * Oh, Tongue (1st ed.). Venice, CA: Beyond Baroque Foundation. 2003.
 * Handbook in Motion: An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse and its Manifestations in Dance (3rd ed.). Vermont: self-published. 1997.
 * Handbook in Motion: An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse and its Manifestations in Dance (2nd ed.). New York: New York University Press. 1980.
 * Angel. New York: self-published. 1978.

Articles by Simone Forti

 * "Artists on L.A.". Artforum. Vol. 50, No. 2, 2011.
 * "The Light of the Dancing". Contact Quarterly. Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer/Fall 2009, Special Focus: Inspiration Expiration, p 17.
 * "itch: writings from a Los Angeles dance journal". Contact Quarterly. Vol. 33 No. 2, Summer/Fall 2008, Special Focus: Activism & Community, p 36 - 39.
 * "The Movement of Attention: An Interview with Daniel Lepkoff". Movement Research Performance Journal. No. 29, 2005, p. 8–9.
 * "Years Later". Movement Research Performance Journal. No. 18, 2004, p. 18.
 * "Animate Dancing: a practice in dance improvisation". Contact Quarterly. Vol. 26 No. 2, Summer/Fall 2001, p 32 - 39.
 * "CI at World Tai Chi Day". Contact Quarterly. Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter/Spring 2001, Still Moving – Contact Improv. shoptalk & dialogue, p 60 - 62.
 * "Young Frog Falls Over". Movement Research Performance Journal. No. 18, 1999, p. 14.
 * "Interview with Nina Martin". Movement Research Performance Journal. No. 17, 1998/1999, p. 26.
 * "The Feel of an Ancient Form". Contact Quarterly. Vol. 23, No. 1, Winter/Spring 1998, Contact Improvisation's 25th Anniversary Issue, p 3.
 * "Reflections on the Early Days". Movement Research Performance Journal. No. 14, 1997.
 * "A Family Tree Story". Movement Research Performance Journal. No. 9, 1994, p. 2.
 * "Thoughts on To Be Continued: a sketch of a dance/narrative process". Contact Quarterly. Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter/Spring 1994, p 13 - 21.
 * "Great Thanks Empty Words: a tribute to John Cage". Contact Quarterly. Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter/Spring 1993, p 94 - IBC.
 * "Far From the Front". Movement Research Performance Journal. No. 5, 1992, p 3.
 * "Organic Telling". Movement Research Performance Journal. No. 1, 1990/1991, p 10.
 * "Tea for Two: A Conversation Between Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer". Contact Quarterly. Vol. 15, No. 2, Spring/Summer 1990, Issues Issue 2, p 27 - 31.
 * "Animating the News". Contact Quarterly. Vol. 15, No. 1, Winter 1990, Issues Issue 1, p 32 - 35.
 * "A Few Months Ago". Contact Quarterly. Vol. 15, No. 1, Winter 1990, Issues Issue 1, p 3.
 * "A Set of Notes Written in the Few Days Before and After New Year 1985". Contact Quarterly. Vol. 12, No. 1, Winter 1987, p 12 - 15.
 * "Banking: Instructions for a Dance". Contact Quarterly. Vol. 11, No. 2, Spring/Summer 1986, Space/Time Issue 2, p 11 - 13.
 * "Full Moves: thoughts on dance behavior". Contact Quarterly. Vol. 9, No. 3, Fall 1984, p 7 - 14.
 * "Home Base". Contact Quarterly. Vol. 5 No. 3/4, Spring/Summer 1980, Focus on Sports, p 6 - 10.
 * "Dancing at the Fence". Avalanche. No. 10, December 1974, p. 20–23.
 * "5 Pieces: Dance Report, Dance Report, Dance Construction, Dance Construction, Instructions for a Dance". In An Anthology of Chance Operations... Eds. Young, La Monte, and Jackson Mac Low. New York: Something Else Press, 1963.
 * "5 Pieces: Dance Report, Dance Report, Dance Construction, Dance Construction, Instructions for a Dance". In An Anthology of Chance Operations... Eds. Young, La Monte, and Jackson Mac Low. New York: Something Else Press, 1963.
 * "5 Pieces: Dance Report, Dance Report, Dance Construction, Dance Construction, Instructions for a Dance". In An Anthology of Chance Operations... Eds. Young, La Monte, and Jackson Mac Low. New York: Something Else Press, 1963.