Simone Forti, artist, choreographer, dancer, poet, and leading figure of New York’s Judson Dance Theater scene of the 1960s, as well as an influential contributor to Minimalism and the Fluxus movement, has passed away in Los Angeles at age 91, her gallery, Raffaella Cortese, confirmed via social media today.
“She was a beloved friend and mentor, whose immeasurable influence on contemporary art, performance, and dance spanned over sixty years,” stated the Milan-based gallery. “We remember her with affection, admiration, and deep gratitude, and we remain committed to carrying forward the memory of her extraordinary work.”
At the Judson Dance Theater in Greenwich Village, Forti became a key figure of then-budding postmodern dance, working alongside the likes of Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer. Forti, whose collaborations included working with choreographers Anna Halprin, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham, liked to simply describe herself as a “movement artist,” in which improvisation remained a guiding thread, according to a gallery statement.
Her edited language spoke to the emerging Minimalist art movement, with seminal bodies of work such as her “Dance Constructions” (1960-61), which she debuted at the Chambers Street Loft Series hosted by Yoko Ono. These works, which transformed Forti’s art and arguably the future of choreography and dance, involved rule-based tasks that performers would interact with, which Forti called “rule games.” The best-known example of this was titled Huddle (1961), where a group of people stands close together and takes turns climbing over each other.
In Handbook in Motion, among Forti’s many influential artist’s books, she called the Dance Constructions, “a pilot concert for works I was to do for years to come.”
Non-Western forms of collective, improvised movement, as well as the pure, or instinctive movement of children and animals, were among her great inspirations. “Being in a dance state,” she has written, is like being in “a state of sleeping, or shivering.” Indeed, for many artists, Forti redefined the meaning of dance.
“The term ‘dance,’ as Simone understood it, could encompass an ever-widening spectrum of events: An account of an onion that sprouted in a glass of water and toppled over from its own weighted development. Two people on either end of a see saw—one reading an art magazine and the other thrashing around—‘danced.’ A man unwinding in a loop of rope suspended from the ceiling, two people bouncing balls while concealing under wooden boxes—‘danced’ … For many of us who had toiled for years in the discipline-bound classrooms of classical and modern dance or were just beginning to wet our feet in the ideas of John Cage, Simone’s work was a revelation,” said dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer.
Ultimately, however, Forti’s creativity knew few bounds. Her works also encompassed writing, video, sculpture, and even holograms. By the 1970s, and back in Los Angeles where she grew up, Forti worked on a series of sculptures on curved, cylindrical plexiglass surfaces. At their center, a small candle illuminated a flickering hologram of Forti as she moved about, echoing forms of tai chi, which was a great source of inspiration for many of her works.
“I like it when my work has lots of parts, like a day of experiences with different energies, lyrical, abrasive, adding up to something complex but without closing in on any particular meaning,” she wrote in an artist statement published in 2018, as part of a residency program at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, north of San Francisco.
Born in Florence in 1935 to a Jewish family, Forti fled fascist Italy in 1938, when she was three years old. The family eventually settled in Los Angeles in 1939. After studying and then dropping out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Forti moved to San Francisco and married sculptor Robert Morris in 1955. While there, she took classes with Anna Halprin, founder of the San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop and an early influence on Forti’s improvisational approach. The two continued working together for several years afterward. By 1959, Forti headed to New York, where she enrolled in the Merce Cunningham Studio. In 1962 Morris and Forti separated, and she soon married her second husband, performance artist Robert Whitman, with whom she collaborated. They divorced in 1966.
After a time spent in Rome and later Woodstock, New York, Forti moved back to Los Angeles. In the 1970s, she studied and taught at the California Institute of the Arts, and jokingly called herself a “CalArts groupie,” because she lived in a large Los Feliz house with Fluxus artist friends who taught there: Alison Knowles, Peter Van Riper, and Nam June Paik.
Forti began gaining greater notoriety late in life and into her 80s. She has performed and exhibited at international institutions ranging from the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2023), the ICA Milano (2019), the Louvre in Paris (2014), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2013), the Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2004), the Castello di Rivoli, Turin (1999), and MoMA P. S. 1, New York (1983, 1977, 1976), to name but a few.
She also won numerous awards, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Biennale Danza in 2023, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2015, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2005.
In 2024, she discussed having Parkinson’s disease with Spike Magazine, and also looked back at her career, legacy, and “a renaissance of some of my work” in museum exhibitions, such as MoMA’s presentation of her “Dance Constructions.” “Over the years, I have done more teaching than performing. And yet, I see that my influence as an artist who works primarily with movement is still alive,” she said.
