Interview mit Simone Forti

Moments. Eine Geschichte der Performance in 10 Akten | Artist
Talk


Exhibition 08.03.2012 – 29.04.2012


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.


Short Biography
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.