Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance

Simone Forti: Dancing as if Newborn

Simone Fort/: Dancing as if Newborn HE ORDINARY ADULT body is a creature of habit, unconscious responses to physical stimuli, unadventurous routines. For the most part, we travel in a kinesthetic rut, never even noticing the remarkably intricate changes that happen when we walk or run, reach up, sit, or lie down. We rarely experiment with these familiar actions, once we have mastered them. To take notice or to run experiments in everyday life would crowd our consciousness with details, making us nearly dysfunctional. Play and art have often been regarded as related activities that allow us to ignore the exigencies of daily existence and spend time concentrating on the pleasures, skills, and powers that our bodies — or other bodies — possess. Two aspects of the play-as-art theory concern dance. The first is that, as both Konrad Lange and Karl Groos held, art resembles the illusion-makingprocess of symbolic games.1 Lange considered art a mature version of make-believe, a deliberate and sophisticated illusory construction. The other aspect, a corollary to the first, is the traditional aesthetic of dance which explains that only by the "play" of bodies more skilled and graceful than our own do we find excitement and beauty. Through her dances Simone Forti proposes a different theory of dance art, one that accepts and values both the real and the commonplace. The simple presymbolic games of children, as well as the activities of animals and plants provide her with movement material that when performed on the adult body makes it a "defamiliarized" object. Forti, who has also choreographed under the names Simone Morris and Simone Forti and Peter Van Riper in a performance of BigRoom. Photograph © Babette Mangolte,1976. T Simone Whitman, was born in Florence, Italy, in 1935, the child of an Italian Jewish family. In 1939 her family escaped to Switzerland and then moved to the United States. She grew up in Los Angeles and went to Reed College in Oregon, majoring in psychology and sociology. In 1956, she and her husband , Robert Morris, dropped out of school and moved to San Francisco. There she discovered that she wanted to be a dancer. For four years Forti studied and performed with Ann Halprin, learning principles and methods that would influence her own work for the next two decades, although not always explicitly. In a sense, Forti began choreographing with an advantage: her body was not ingrained with any one technique or theory of dance, in part because she started dancing at the age of twenty-one, and in part because her teacher was Ann Halprin. Halprin had broken with conventional modern dance just a year before, substituting for academic codes of specialized movements a tolerant, inquisitive, open attitude toward the body's capabilities, in the service of self-expression and spatial architecture . Holding classes on a huge outdoor platform at the foot of Mount Tamalpais , Halprin encouraged improvisation, not as a blind flood of expression but as a means to set loose all conceivable movements, gestures, and combinations of anatomical relationships, ignoring connotation, and bypassing habit and preference. Halprin approached improvisation analytically. The body's operation as an instrument was the primary focus of her investigations . She might explore, for example, what happens when the position of the spine changes while running, or ask her students to notice how, when holding two rocks, the added weight and momentum changed the relationships among body parts. When Forti studied with Halprin, the mornings were devoted to these sorts of explorations and the evenings to improvisations arising more often from imagery than from kinesiological analysis. The important thing was to work free associatively, trying not to compose or to judge the movements, or to create any overview, but simply to be "very strict about letting out whatever flickered through."2 Forherself, Forti recallsvividly, improvisation was often involved with "crawly, underground ant-tunnel imagery." The Dancers' Workshop (Halprin's group) also worked together on performance projects, often in collaboration with the other artists who gathered at Halprin's studio in Kentfield, California — including composer La Monte Young, actor John Graham, dancer A. A. Leath, painter Jo Landor, and Halprin 's husband, architect Lawrence Halprin. One project on which Graham, Ann Halprin, and Forti (then known as Simone Morris) worked together was 22 TERPSICHORE IN SNEAKERS a set of improvisations involving language that had its source in Graham's concerns as an actor. Forti came to...