Simone Forti, pioneer of postmodern dance, has died aged ninety-one, her gallery Raffaella Cortese has announced.
Born into a Jewish family in Florence in 1935, Simone Forti had to emigrate with her family when Mussolini stripped Jewish Italians of their citizenship in 1938. Moving through Switzerland, France, New York City and Los Angeles, Forti then went to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, before dropping out and moving to San Francisco, where she studied with the dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin.
In 1959 Forti returned to New York City, where she met artists, dancers and composers of the downtown performance scene, including Robert Ellis Dunn, John Cage, Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton, and contributed to the early development of Fluxus. In 1960 she first presented her ‘Dance Constructions’ at Reuben Gallery then at Yoko Ono’s Chambers Street Loft Series. These ‘constructions’, ordinary actions prompted by cheap materials like plywood and rope, were influential in Rainer and Paxton’s founding of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962.
Following a one-year stint in Italy, where Forti spent time at the zoo and started integrating animal movements into her choreography, she returned to the US and taught at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Throughout the 1980s, she continued to develop her dance practice, pairing movement with language in what she called ‘Logomotion’ and creating performances in response to newspapers with her ‘News Animations’. In 1988 she moved to Vermont, where a community of artists had already settled, including her friend and collaborator Steve Paxton.
Forti returned to Los Angeles durimg the late 1990s, where she taught at UCLA. She gained institutional recognition later in her life, with her first major retrospective exhibition at Museum der Moderne, Salzburg in 2014 and the acquisition of her ‘Dance Constructions’ by MoMA, New York, the following year. In 2023 she was awarded the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement.
