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.
