Simone Forti is not a name that trips off the tongue of even the most dedicated dance lover. Yet this American pioneer has done as much as anyone to shape contemporary dance. “My creative life began when I met her,” said choreographer Yvonne Rainer, herself no slouch when it comes to the pioneering front.
Now 88, and with Parkinson’s disease, Forti is this year’s Golden Lion at the Venice Dance Biennale, where an exhibition explains her significance and captures her achievements. A group of students from the Biennale Dance College recreate some of her seminal works: Huddle, where dancers take turns to detach themselves from a sturdy group and climb over the limbs of their fellows; Hangers, in which three people stand in great loops of rope while the others buffet them to and fro; and Slant Board, which asks three dancers to grapple with knotted ropes, testing their weight as they move like climbers.
All three were part of the Dance Constructions that Forti exhibited in Yoko Ono’s studio in 1961, asserting the two principles that make the choreographer so significant: that dance is art, and that all movement can be dance. What made her such a revolutionary influence, however, was the intensity with which she performed. The young students recreate her works with a serious grace, but when you see Forti herself on blurry black-and-white film, she blazes.
The exhibition, mounted in Venice in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, covers her entire range of work from the 1960s to the present day, from early holograms to line drawings to the painted paper bags she created during Covid. But it’s the videos that most explain Forti’s belief that in moving, she can express thought and feeling.
In one section you can simultaneously watch her in Big Room from 1978, improvising to her then husband Peter Van Riper’s music, and in 2016’s A Free Consultation, where she crawls through a snowy landscape towards the sea, clutching a radio. In the early piece she is a figure of power, carving the space with her hands, hair flying as she turns, prowling on all fours, in absolute control. In 2016 she shakes, her effort constrained. But in both she moves with such urgency that she commands attention for the importance of what she conveys, whether it’s about force and gravity or about human suffering. She is a maker to be reckoned with.
So is the French choreographer Rachid Ouramdane, whose 2019 piece Variation(s) has been an early highlight of this year’s biennale, which is curated by Wayne McGregor. Like Forti, Ouramdane’s work is an exploration of what the body can express, and in this deceptively simple but richly rewarding piece he creates two solos for two contrasting dancers – tapper Rubén Sánchez and contemporary dancer Annie Hanauer – to the same piece of music by Jean-Baptiste Julien.
Sánchez sets the rhythm in a half hour of blistering invention, his expression and emotion constantly shifting as his feet and body create breathtaking patterns. The lights go down and then, without pause, Hanauer begins to move with glorious fluency, expressing the melody with expansive turns and gestures. The same but different – both challenging and gorgeous.
Star ratings (out of five)
Simone Forti ★★★★★
Rachid Ouramdane: Variation(s) ★★★★★
