Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Simone Forti: Dancing as if Newborn
The 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-making process of symbolic games. 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 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." For herself, Forti recalls vividly, 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 a set of improvisations involving language that had its source in Graham's concerns as an actor. Forti came to call these experiments the Nez plays:
I felt that we were working out of a Zen state. But it wasn't Zen, so we took the word Nez. Sometimes I would say things as contrasts, like apple-green. It would come out of a sudden image, or a need, for tartness or for something as plain as a color. There'd be long dialogues, and a lot of juxtaposition.
Since high school, when Forti and a friend discovered a movie theater that showed surrealist films, she had been intrigued by fantastic juxtapositions. By the time she worked with Halprin, Forti had read Kurt Schwitters' Merz scenarios, which may have provided another source for her own title. Schwitters, making junk collages, poetry, environments, and performances, began in 1920 to label his entire oeuvre Merz, preferring to use his own fortuitous title (it had appeared in one of his collages, a fragment of the word komMERZiell) to avoid identifying totally with the Dadaists. Schwitters envisioned a Merz drama that totally fused all the art forms, using objects as principal actors, and employing both everyday and improbable materials in illogical combinations:
Even people can be used.
People can even be tied to backdrops.
People can even appear actively, even in their everyday position, they can speak on two legs, even in sensible sentences ...
And now begins the fire of musical saturation. Organs backstage sing and say, "Futt, futt." The sewing machine rattles along in the lead. A man in the wings says: "Bah." ... A water pipe drips with uninhibited monotony ...
Schwitters was never able to stage his Merz dramas. But the influence of his vision on later avant-garde theater, especially the Happenings in the 1960s, is obvious.
Halprin also had a gift for evoking deep concentration, for helping her students arrive at what Forti now calls a "dance state," a "state of enchantment." At the workshops, one learned that such a state could be voluntarily induced:
Sometimes it would be a matter of doing an activity that would set you up or help you induce the dance state. It could be just walking around in a circle and focusing on the sensations in your body. The sensation of one part moving against another. Of momentum — of different parts, of the mass. And being satisfied to stay focused on those sensations for — oh, fifteen minutes. And then a lot of impulses start to come.
The use of natural movements has informed Forti's work since her studies with Halprin. The movements are "natural" in the sense that they came out of a relaxed state and without preparation but instinctively, organically — in contrast to movements characterized by the tension of both ballet and modern dance. Every movement has a distinctive quality, Halprin taught, and discrimination against different possibilities of movement experiences can only be restricting.
But after four years of improvising, Forti found the chaos of total freedom and the continuing floods of imagery disturbing. She feels that there was a correlation with the impasse that abstract expressionism reached at about the same time. Morris, who had been painting abstract expressionist works during those four years — and encouraging Forti to paint too — gave up painting when they moved to New York in 1959, she recalls.
In New York, Forti took classes briefly at the Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham studios. But she "would not hold [her] stomach in" at the Graham classes, and she found the speed and fragmentation of the Cunningham style bewildering. She felt that Cunningham was brilliant at articulating the adult, isolated condition, but that "the thing I had to offer was still very close to the holistic and generalized response of infants." She taught at a nursery school, where the meaningfully repetitive movements of the children captured her attention, and she listened often to the reductive music of La Monte Young, whose use of simple, clear, sustained tones impressed her deeply. After seeing Robert Whitman's Happening E.G. in 1960, she felt that she had discovered an aesthetic close to her own. Later that year, she worked with Whitman on his The American Moon.7 Another influence on her at this time were reports on the activities of the Gutai group in Japan. (Michael Kirby suggests that their action works were one important inspiration for Happenings.) A group of artists in their twenties and thirties experimenting with unusual media, their "paintings" included sheets of tinfoil scratched with a blue-inked pen, and a vinyl canvas covered with paint by means of a brush attached to a toy tank. They held exhibits of their works out-of-doors in a pine grove, and they presented action works as well as finished objects. In a piece by Koichi Nakahashi and Yasuo Sumi, paper balls dipped in paint were thrown at a white wall, after which ladles full of colored water were thrown at a cellophane wall that separated the artists and the audience. Forti had seen photographs of Gutai's work before she left San Francisco.
The same year, Forti joined the Robert Dunn composition class taught at the Cunningham studio. She says that she enjoyed the use of chance techniques gleaned from John Cage's music scores, seeing aleatory methods not as a relinquishing of control but as a means of evoking in performance the original events and structures at the moment of composition. She appreciated Dunn's stress on working quickly, and on clarifying the concept behind each dance. Yet for someone who had already been experimenting for four years with Halprin and other artists on the West Coast, the Dunn class must have been frustrating at times. The rest of the students were discovering a new world of dance, but Forti already inhabited it. In the summer of 1960, Forti had returned to Halprin's workshop with Morris for the summer, bringing a New York friend — Yvonne Rainer — with her.
In December 1960, Forti was invited to participate in a group evening at the Reuben Gallery, which had been the site of several Happenings. Forti contributed See-Saw and Rollers to a program that also included A Shining Bed by Jim Dine and Blackouts by Claes Oldenburg. Both of Forti's pieces were games for adults based, with very few changes, on children's playground equipment. The structure of each piece showed the operations of the adult body in a situation that is ordinary for children, but rare for adults. Skills of balancing and adapting to momentum were tested in a systematic examination of the processes of equilibrium.
See-Saw began when Robert Morris set an eight-foot plank on a sawhorse fulcrum, attaching it to two walls by elastic cords at either end. A toy that made a mooing sound when moved was fixed to one end of the seesaw. Morris removed the coat he had been wearing and, dressed in a sweater and shorts, sat on one end of the plank while Yvonne Rainer, identically dressed, got on the other. They seesawed for a while, creating zigzag patterns with the plank and elastic, and then made a series of movements that forced the balance to fluctuate radically. Rainer shrieked and threw herself around (an improvisation based on Forti's having thrown a ragged jacket onto the floor, saying "Improvise that!"); Morris read in a flat voice from Art News, then together they stood in the center of the plank, gently shifting it back and forth while Forti, stationed at the lighting board, sang a nonsense song. Yvonne Rainer has stated that See-Saw influenced her own work: she was impressed by the use of the seesaw for its physical properties, and the resulting demands it made on the performers. But she was especially affected by the episodic, unconnected structure of the piece. "One thing followed another. Whenever I am in doubt I think of that. One thing follows another."
In Rollers, two shallow wooden boxes mounted on wheels, each containing a singing performer, were made to careen madly by means of three ropes attached to each wagon, manipulated by members of the audience. The wild movement of the boxes "produces an excitement bordering on fear, which automatically becomes an element in [the] performance." The fear was immediately evident both in the voices and in the physical adjustments of the performers as they adapted or surrendered to the increasing momentum of the wagons.
These two dances, billed as Happenings, were as different from conventional dance concerts as could be imagined. The performers wore street clothes instead of leotards. In See-Saw, the man and the woman were dressed exactly alike. In Rollers, the spectators were called on to participate. And although the activities for each piece were planned in advance, the outcome of the specific movements was indeterminate. The dances took place in a gallery, not on a stage, and, rather than framing special movements requiring the technical skill of trained dancers, these pieces simply required ordinary movements that permitted the performers to meet the demands of the equipment. Neither illusion, story, mood, place, nor character were "created." The performers were not making believe, but simply executing certain commonplace actions.
For her next concert, part of a series at Yoko Ono's loft on Chambers Street, which included an environment by Morris; music by Philip Corner, La Monte Young, and Richard Maxfield; and poetry by Jackson MacLow, Forti made an evening called "Five Dance Constructions and Some Other Things." Almost all of the pieces, which were done at different sites in the loft, have been performed at later concerts.
One construction, Slant Board, for three or four people, takes place on a wooden ramp slanted at a 45-degree angle to the floor, and leaning against the wall. Five or six ropes, knotted at one-foot intervals, are attached to the top of the ramp, and the performers are instructed to move constantly and calmly, from top to bottom, and from side to side, on the incline. They may rest during the piece, but must remain on the board for its duration — about ten minutes. The steepness of the incline turns the task into a strenuous one, testing the endurance of the performers at its limits.
Huddle, another dance construction, provides a human structure for the performers to climb. Six or seven people form a strong web by facing each other and bending forward, planting their feet firmly, keeping the knees slightly bent, and putting their arms around each other's waists and shoulders. One person separates from the structure (which tightens in compensation), climbs over the huddle slowly and calmly, finding available foot- and handholds supplied by the other bodies, and rejoins the huddle on the other side. There is no particular order for climbing, but by the shifting of balance and readjustment of center that takes place when one person withdraws to start the climb, the group can immediately feel one person's intention to ascend. Huddle lasts for about ten minutes and is meant to be walked around and examined by the audience like a sculpture. As a structure it frees the body from a standing position and allows for new movements and positions. Like Slant Board, it is a cooperative game which requires its performers to formulate ad hoc, intuitive and consensual rules in order that the individual plans progress smoothly. In Huddle, laughing is permitted, as is the occasional possibility of two people climbing at once. At times, Huddle has been used to proliferate second-generation huddles, when the performers from the original group find audience members to join them in the game.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Terpsichore in Sneakers"
by .
Copyright © 1987 Sally Banes.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
