Pioneering artist Simone Forti played a significant role in revolutionizing dance in the 1960s andearly ‘70s. Born in Florence, Italy, in 1935, at age five she fled with her family to escape Mussolini’s regime, eventually settling in Los Angeles. Forti attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where she met artist Robert Morris. They married and dropped out of school, moving to San Francisco in 1955. Forti later completed her BFA at Hunter College in New York in 1965.
In San Francisco, Forti studied modern dance techniques under Anna Halprin. The late 1950s and early 1960s marked a shift away from traditional dance toward the development of radical new forms based on natural gestures, everyday tasks, and the essence of movement. When Halprin’s interests evolved to improvisation, Forti was thrilled and participated in sessions held at Halprin’s mountain home studio. While improvisation was revolutionary in dance, Forti recalls, “In San Francisco, the Beat Poets were reading with the jazz musicians who were improvising. Maybe there was not yet so much improvisation in dance, but improvisation was in the air: that kind of energy of creating in the moment in front of the public. Creating music, words, movement, in the moment was part of what was happening at that time.”
Around 1960, Forti and Morris moved to New York City, where she studied composition at the Merce Cunningham Studio. Forti became interested in the ideas of composer John Cage, whose embrace of Zen Buddhism and Dada influenced his compositions, drawing on chance proceduresthat resonated with Forti’s own background in improvisational dance. Soon after, Forti createdarguably her most famous work, Dance Constructions (1960–61), for a series of interdisciplinary programs organized by La Monte Young at Yoko Ono’s loft.
Dance Constructions merged the task elements of Halprin with an object or visual situation.Individuals performed simple maneuvers, such as lying under, scrambling up, swinging from, or balancing on an array of roughhewn sculpture props. For example, Slant Board (1961) is a tilted plywood square that performers scale using knotted ropes, and See-Saw (1960) consists of a plank of wood and a sawhorse that two individuals activate. Their movements investigate balance and reciprocity, while they simultaneously put pressure on a noisemaking toy strapped underneath the plank, adding a sense of humor to the piece. Dance Constructions was highly influential and greatly impacted the practices of Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Steve Paxton, who would later form the legendary Judson Dance Theater in 1962.
In 1968, Forti traveled to Rome, where she lived for two years in an apartment near the zoo. Observing animals in captivity gave her new perspectives on movement. She began visiting the zoo in the afternoons and spent her mornings working on movements inspired by the animals. Forti adapted patterns of movement, such as pacing and swinging her head back and forth, based on the repetitive actions of big cats, polar bears, and elephants. Sleepwalkers (sometimes referred to as Zoo Mantras [1968]) draws from animal movements and consists of several parts. In onesegment, she tries to go to sleep standing up, inspired by flamingos, which can snooze on one leg. In another segment, she mimics the polar bear’s back-and-forth swaying.
Forti’s focus on animals in captivity may have stemmed from feelings of isolation or loneliness she felt in Italy, the impact of the country’s recent Fascist past on her life, or even the widespread despair from the Vietnam War. Julia Bryan-Wilson notes, “In her work, animals are not idealized and romanticized—or rather, they are not only idealized and romanticized (for there is surely some of that, too)—as emblems of freedom and base urges but are recognized as beings forced into circumstances beyond their control, constantly mediated by human intervention…. [W]ithinthe laboratory conditions of a zoo, animals mirror human civilization’s harshest tendencies.”Upon her return to New York, Forti continued her animal studies at Central Park Zoo. In 1974, she produced Three Grizzlies, a 22-minute film that captures grizzly bears pacing and whirling in their cages. The information collected for this project would inform the movements in Solo No.1(1974).
Filmed at Sonnabend Gallery in New York, Solo No. 1 opens with Forti walking hypnotically in circles before she falls to the floor and begins an improvised cycle of walking, crawling, rolling, sliding, and leaping. Dressed in ordinary attire—a button-down shirt tucked into a pair of white trousers—Forti performs barefoot. The set design is minimal, with only a large white curtain hanging from the ceiling in the background, and there is no accompanying sound apart from the noise of her footsteps and the distant sounds of New York traffic. The absence of theatrical embellishment gives the performance a modest, everyday quality reflecting the broader postmodernist belief that any movement could be considered dance.
The video performance blurs the line between human and nonhuman animals and raises questions about the authority and authenticity of the human figure. Forti enacts a form of reverse anthropomorphism, attributing animal traits to humans. By doing so, Solo No. 1 expresses the artist’s empathy. As Danni Shen writes, “when the human becomes the animal and vice versa, acting out one’s animality helps us understand the ways in which we are intertwined with, rather than against.”
—Kanitra Fletcher