Moments. Gespräch mit Simone Forti

Topographic reading points, which Simone Forti noted when travelling through urban areas, encouraged her to produce the work Face Tunes in 1967. In this work, she transfers the outline of human portraits in codified contoured lines. As musical scores, these scaled lines embody movement, whereby the scales are wandered through by following the traces recorded in a score with a flute. Face Tunes stands for a phase in the work where the choreographer propagates her minimalistic scores as applied to the analysis of movement with music. Forti’s systematic method of working also reveals itself in the archiving of her works for which she makes use of a many-sided historical approach: she began documenting her works in sketches and in artist’s books early on in her career. Today, she develops training videos which facilitate specific and authorized live transmission of her performances. During the exhibition, Simone Forti reenacts Face Tunes thereby conveying the ability to restage the performance to the witnesses.

The artist Simone Forti (*1935 in Florence, immigrated to the USA in 1939) works in the media of dance, text and drawing. As co-founder of the Judson Dance Theater, she played an important role in the new orientation of dance in New York during the 1960s. In pieces such as Huddle or See-Saw, she united the methods of improvisation she learned from Anna Halprin along with the conceptual freedom and precision through which John Cage exercised his influence at that time. In the reconstruction of works such as Dance Constructions, produced in 1961 and shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2009, the contemporaneity of approach continues to be perceptible.