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Reviewed by:
  • Soft Is Fast: Simone Forti in the 1960s and After by Meredith Morse, and: Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body ed. by Sabine Breitwieser
  • Wendy Perron (bio)
Meredith Morse, Soft Is Fast: Simone Forti in the 1960s and After. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016; Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body, edited by Sabine Breitwieser for Museum der Moderne Salzburg, München: Hirmer Verlag, 2014.

Two recent books go a long way toward giving Simone Forti her due. As Meredith Morse points out in Soft Is Fast, Forti was overlooked for having an influence on contemporary dance and art until this century, when she became more in demand as a performer. But for anyone looking back at how dance and visual art intertwined in the twentieth century, Forti is a pivotal figure. Her work defies categorization. Movement, visual tracing, and verbal language are so braided together as to be inseparable. In recognition of her status as a major interdisciplinary artist, the Museum of Modern Art has recently acquired Forti’s groundbreaking Dance Constructions including Huddle, Slant Board, and See-Saw.

Soft Is Fast takes its title from a piece in Forti’s book Oh, Tongue, and it quotes liberally from her earlier Handbook in Motion. Originally a dissertation, it begins by discussing the artists that shaped Forti’s work, including Anna Halprin, John Cage, La Monte Young, and Robert Whitman. It then provides an accurate, more academic description of the various stages of Forti’s career, including her work with Halprin, her dance constructions, her animal studies, news animations, and collaborations with musicians. Forti is also placed in the context of many other artists and theorists. As Morse traces the evolution from minimal art to process art, she discusses choreographers Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs as well as visual artists Robert Morris, Richard Serra, and Eva Hesse. The prose is precise but flat, however, and no amount of scholarship could ever fully evoke the alchemy of Forti’s performances.

Thinking with the Body, a 303-page catalogue of Forti’s major retrospective in Salzburg, offers a more compelling array of voices. It begins with a lively, wide-ranging interview with Forti herself, conducted by Sabine Breitwieser, who curated [End Page 113] the exhibit. The book also includes brilliant essays by Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton, a reprint of “Notes on Simone Forti” by Robert Morris, and an interview with Toshi Wada on Forti and sound. It displays hundreds of photographs, drawings, and handwritten journal entries, presenting a sumptuous account of this unique career. The ink drawings of animals and women reveal an assurance of line, possibly borne of Forti’s affinity for other living creatures. Her watercolors pop off the page with bold shapes and vibrant colors. As with her performances, the earthy simplicity of her drawings is edged with wit and humor. Even just perusing Breitwieser’s catalogue reveals many different aspects of Forti’s work. In one section, she describes attending an all-night performance of John Cage’s Empty Words, based on Thoreau’s journals: “It was as if time had expanded and I, the listener, found myself standing between two letters or in between two sides of a single sound that this ancient was sending for us into distant space.”

Forti is a unifying figure in dance and art, an artist to be treasured. While she has not been as prolific as her compatriots Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown— both of whom were highly influenced by her—she has taught us to value natural movement as well as the cognitive and kinetic connections between what we see, what we hear, and what we say. Thinking with the Body gives a lasting sense of both Forti’s significance and her playfulness. [End Page 114]

Wendy Perron

WENDY PERRON, author of Through the Eyes of a Dancer, had a thirty-year career as a dancer/choreographer, teacher, and writer. She danced with Trisha Brown in the 1970s and choreographed more than forty works for her own company. She has taught at Bennington, Princeton, and the Five College Dance Department, and currently leads an MFA course at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. A former editor-in...

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