The Venice Dance Biennale awarded the 2023 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to Simone Forti, a visionary, innovative artist that is a quite peculiar character even in a world as intriguing and hybridized as modern dance.
Forti represents the ideal image of the artist that knows no borders and whose art never took a step back in front of creative elan: motion, improvisation, performance, voice, music, objects… a total commitment to multi-disciplinarity. Born in Florence in 1935, Simone Forti moved to Los Angeles with her parents at three years of age after Italy enacted racial laws that targeted Jews.
She later attended Anne Halprin’s Dancers’ Workshop in San Francisco. Halprin was working on the rejection of classical dance techniques and formality to elaborate a new kind of dance that integrated improvisation as part of an anatomical experience. This is where Simone Forti developed her own rejection of the choreographic dimension not only of classical dance, but of then-popular modern dance. In her eyes, motion is the expression of the thinking body, not only an expression of biological vitality, but a place where thought – logos – shows. In cooperation with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Dance Biennale will host the European inauguration of the exhibition Simone Forti.
Featured image: Simone Forti © Jason-Underhill 2012. Courtesy of the artist and The Box LA
