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Handbook in Motion
An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse and its manifestations in Dance. Simone Forti is a dancer who has always forged her own path. She arrived in New York in the early 60's from California. She brought with her a series of pieces that proved to be of serious influence on the development of "post modern" dance and sculpture in years to come. Her "dance-constructions" were based on a concern with bodies in action, the movement not being stylized or presented for its visual line but rather as a physical fact. The artist traces the development of her work intuitively rather than chronologically, including narratives about a time of participation in the drug culture that sheds light on the changes in her dancing. The book includes drawings, "dance reports" (short descriptions of events whose movement made a deep impression on the author's memory), and documentary materials such as scores, descriptions, and photographic records of performances.
- GenresArt
152 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 30, 2018
a gorgeous little book of thoughts, reflections, and personal experiences that have led to simone forti's magical artistic process. one of those perfect little books that open worlds with just a few words.
May 17, 2013
Great book by a thrilling artist and fabulous person. Very raw and playful at the same time. It's got lots of photographs, drawings, documentation of works and performances, photocopies of her journal pages, reprints of journal pages so you get to see her handwriting, and just a wonderful kaleidoscope of writing by Forti about herself, her art and her various journeys and experiences in many places.
Here's a bunch of examples of the kinds of great text you'll find inside:
when cold weather came i spent days upon days watching the fire. Watching the changes, the crumblings, watching the heating that accompanies a crumbling as new surfaces are revealed, watching the coolings as a flaming log burns through and breaks in two, each half falling away from the center of heat. I remember feeling that sitting in front of the fire was equivalent to sitting in the sun. And equivalent to bathing. Or baking instead of bathing. The body smells would cook down to a kind of fresh live sweetness, and I would tune into the smell of me. In doing this, I tuned into my feelings in a deeper sense. I developed a deeper understanding of my times of heat and non-heat, and, perhaps, in a much more subliminal way, mainly through reading movements, I tuned into the balance of the people around me.
I felt I could no longer share accept anything I wasn't free to share with anyone whose crossed path with mine.
I didn't know what to make of it all [re: lessons with pandit pran nath]. I loved the singing, but my elbows were pulling in at my sides, my chin was pulling back into my neck, my eyes were pulling down to the ground, and my palms were pulling together.
I kept thinking about that sword in my hand [the tamboura], and I returned to dancing as a self-conscious art as to an old friend.
sometimes i would start a painting by taking a nap on a freshly stretched canvas
meanwhile, in the night, i would often wake up startled, dancing in my sleep. One of my recurrent sleep-dances always ended in my reaching past the mattress and loudly rapping my knuckles on the floor. I think that improvisation was really beginning to pain me. I can remember saying that my inner ear can no longer take those limitless seas. There just seemed to be all this turmoil and turning of image upon image.
I recall a statement I made in exasperation one day in the studio. I said that merce cunningham was a master of adult, isolated articulation. and that the thing i had to offer was still very close to the holistic and generalized response of infants.
It struck me that most of my actions were done not in order that the movement be seen, but so that the particular task could be accomplished.
from handwritten pages:
I guess at different times I'll be writing about different things and in different ways.
#1 I won't decide to plunge into dance effort
#2 I can't decide to just stop altogether
I'd love to go on a long cross country trek. Ah fresh air. But I know I'll half drag along with this art business for some time to come.
I have an idea for a sculpture but if i make it what will i do with it. I would hate to love it. here it is: (drawing)
It might even be fun to make. But what then? what then? Got a letter from P and H. Seems things are jumping there.
And yet…I don;'t want to be jumping. Waiting
Waiting to see?
(scribbled out letters and a jangly arrow)
children but i can't manage the externals of the teacher role. I can't seem to take on the ear-marks of the bourgeois adult. They think I'm childish. No. Its not childishness. Its just an other way of being. If I were fifty i couldn't do like they do. No its not childishness. Its an other way of being. Not a better way, but they seem threatened
mar 29
art - formaldehyde
know i'm acclimated to NY art because I'm sick of everything.
pinky-clad professional young women art bureaucracy - possible to work outside of? but must not expect anyones respect. might even lose friendships. losing taste for "center". everything else equally disgusting.
Thinking about art. why? maybe for the same reason that I'm not somewhere in the amazon this minute. Just the continuing setup of my life. art isn't a physical interest for me like it was, its just a role which more or less continues. Yes, i'llbe doing aloft concert. That does interest me. The responsibility part of it interests me.
This place is closed off and damp. Ive gotten so far away from dance. In all ways. so completely. and yet i still respond.
if i just stretch i could almost bash my teeth out. May 2. feeling very low tonight.
a real change had taken place in me. I was seeking a teaching job, but I refused to pull out my old credentials, i.e. the name i had once made for myself. In certain ways, the whole question of being an artist was still suspect. it's hard for me to remember, because my thinking continues to change. But i must try to remember. there wa s a time, in new york, when i felt in competition with other dancers, with other artists, and had a competitive sense of identity. And dancing functioned, to a great extent, defined with that way of sensing identity. One aspect of work was that it invented ground. In fact, part of my grid of requirements was to invent ground.
I couldn't understand, but i sensed a common world view between an aesthetic research coming out of New York and the foreign policy coming out of Washington.
We've all gone through times of every morning waking up scared.
a close-up view of the very grain of dynamics
heavy hand spinners
The pieces are like water that, covering trees in an ice storm, stands in the air. The dancing can seek its level, slowly carving channels inherent in the land. Perhaps I've shied away from the pieces b/c just now I love the dancing more, and b/c the pieces always come to me with that acrid smell from under my arms that in high school used to warn me that I was about to raise my hand to set everybody straight on any issue at hand. And that smell pinpoints for me the fact that if I ever felt a conflict between being a woman and being an artist, it's been in the dimension of what might be my endocrine balance. Finally, it has nothing to do with engaging in creative pursuits in itself but with the hormonal posture that seems to accompany being a professional artist in our society.
It is said of a certain great Tai Chi master that if a fly landed on his arm he could render it unable to fly away simply by dropping his arm in exact proportion to the fly's push-off.
Here's a bunch of examples of the kinds of great text you'll find inside:
when cold weather came i spent days upon days watching the fire. Watching the changes, the crumblings, watching the heating that accompanies a crumbling as new surfaces are revealed, watching the coolings as a flaming log burns through and breaks in two, each half falling away from the center of heat. I remember feeling that sitting in front of the fire was equivalent to sitting in the sun. And equivalent to bathing. Or baking instead of bathing. The body smells would cook down to a kind of fresh live sweetness, and I would tune into the smell of me. In doing this, I tuned into my feelings in a deeper sense. I developed a deeper understanding of my times of heat and non-heat, and, perhaps, in a much more subliminal way, mainly through reading movements, I tuned into the balance of the people around me.
I felt I could no longer share accept anything I wasn't free to share with anyone whose crossed path with mine.
I didn't know what to make of it all [re: lessons with pandit pran nath]. I loved the singing, but my elbows were pulling in at my sides, my chin was pulling back into my neck, my eyes were pulling down to the ground, and my palms were pulling together.
I kept thinking about that sword in my hand [the tamboura], and I returned to dancing as a self-conscious art as to an old friend.
sometimes i would start a painting by taking a nap on a freshly stretched canvas
meanwhile, in the night, i would often wake up startled, dancing in my sleep. One of my recurrent sleep-dances always ended in my reaching past the mattress and loudly rapping my knuckles on the floor. I think that improvisation was really beginning to pain me. I can remember saying that my inner ear can no longer take those limitless seas. There just seemed to be all this turmoil and turning of image upon image.
I recall a statement I made in exasperation one day in the studio. I said that merce cunningham was a master of adult, isolated articulation. and that the thing i had to offer was still very close to the holistic and generalized response of infants.
It struck me that most of my actions were done not in order that the movement be seen, but so that the particular task could be accomplished.
from handwritten pages:
I guess at different times I'll be writing about different things and in different ways.
#1 I won't decide to plunge into dance effort
#2 I can't decide to just stop altogether
I'd love to go on a long cross country trek. Ah fresh air. But I know I'll half drag along with this art business for some time to come.
I have an idea for a sculpture but if i make it what will i do with it. I would hate to love it. here it is: (drawing)
It might even be fun to make. But what then? what then? Got a letter from P and H. Seems things are jumping there.
And yet…I don;'t want to be jumping. Waiting
Waiting to see?
(scribbled out letters and a jangly arrow)
children but i can't manage the externals of the teacher role. I can't seem to take on the ear-marks of the bourgeois adult. They think I'm childish. No. Its not childishness. Its just an other way of being. If I were fifty i couldn't do like they do. No its not childishness. Its an other way of being. Not a better way, but they seem threatened
mar 29
art - formaldehyde
know i'm acclimated to NY art because I'm sick of everything.
pinky-clad professional young women art bureaucracy - possible to work outside of? but must not expect anyones respect. might even lose friendships. losing taste for "center". everything else equally disgusting.
Thinking about art. why? maybe for the same reason that I'm not somewhere in the amazon this minute. Just the continuing setup of my life. art isn't a physical interest for me like it was, its just a role which more or less continues. Yes, i'llbe doing aloft concert. That does interest me. The responsibility part of it interests me.
This place is closed off and damp. Ive gotten so far away from dance. In all ways. so completely. and yet i still respond.
if i just stretch i could almost bash my teeth out. May 2. feeling very low tonight.
a real change had taken place in me. I was seeking a teaching job, but I refused to pull out my old credentials, i.e. the name i had once made for myself. In certain ways, the whole question of being an artist was still suspect. it's hard for me to remember, because my thinking continues to change. But i must try to remember. there wa s a time, in new york, when i felt in competition with other dancers, with other artists, and had a competitive sense of identity. And dancing functioned, to a great extent, defined with that way of sensing identity. One aspect of work was that it invented ground. In fact, part of my grid of requirements was to invent ground.
I couldn't understand, but i sensed a common world view between an aesthetic research coming out of New York and the foreign policy coming out of Washington.
We've all gone through times of every morning waking up scared.
a close-up view of the very grain of dynamics
heavy hand spinners
The pieces are like water that, covering trees in an ice storm, stands in the air. The dancing can seek its level, slowly carving channels inherent in the land. Perhaps I've shied away from the pieces b/c just now I love the dancing more, and b/c the pieces always come to me with that acrid smell from under my arms that in high school used to warn me that I was about to raise my hand to set everybody straight on any issue at hand. And that smell pinpoints for me the fact that if I ever felt a conflict between being a woman and being an artist, it's been in the dimension of what might be my endocrine balance. Finally, it has nothing to do with engaging in creative pursuits in itself but with the hormonal posture that seems to accompany being a professional artist in our society.
It is said of a certain great Tai Chi master that if a fly landed on his arm he could render it unable to fly away simply by dropping his arm in exact proportion to the fly's push-off.
June 8, 2025
basically psychedelics and hippie utopias with dance in-between.
a nice retrospective though.
a nice retrospective though.
April 18, 2008
I loved this book. read it while i wanted to quit music/art. tracing the development of her work, it goes back and forth in time, starting with her experiences at Woodstock, and that whole next year where she dropped out of her former life and lived in communes. then goes back to her artistic life before that in the 50s, her marriages...then forward to her time at Cal Arts, her struggles to find collaborators (something i can comiserate with.) has snippets from her journals, photos of her early works. i love books that make art-making real, shows the struggles and the mundane-ness of the actual process, but also how its essential to her living and growing.
January 26, 2011
"It seems to me when the polar bear swings his head, he is in a dance state. He is in a state of establishing measure, and of communion with the forces of which he is part."
I got to see simone do her polar bear head swing at moca last weekend and it was beautiful. This is a wonderful little bundle of stories, prose-poems, drawings, photos, scribbles and memories. A card pasted to the title page of the library copy I read informs me that this copy was originally purchased as part of an adult literacy program and that it helped some man or woman learn to read. What a wonderful book to learn to read with!
I got to see simone do her polar bear head swing at moca last weekend and it was beautiful. This is a wonderful little bundle of stories, prose-poems, drawings, photos, scribbles and memories. A card pasted to the title page of the library copy I read informs me that this copy was originally purchased as part of an adult literacy program and that it helped some man or woman learn to read. What a wonderful book to learn to read with!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews