In the huddle with Forti

Now in her mid-70s, Simone Forti looks less like an esteemed elder from dance's radical Judson wing--which, of course, she is--and more like a pixie, slim in form and potentially mischievous in bright red boots. Though somewhat tentative in speech, she takes to movement with a breathtaking combination of instinctual eagerness and soft ease, a kind of "come on in, the water's fine" approach that makes you believe in yourself, even as a person just watching in admiration.

Baryshnikov Arts Center's BAC Flicks series presented Simone Forti: An Evening of Dance Constructions (2009), which documents the 2004 re-creation of some of her early works at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles).  The program, introduced by Forti, concluded with a Q & A and delicious live performances of Huddle (1961) and Scramble (1970).

While it was interesting to swivel one's attention between dances running simultaneously on two screens--besides Huddle, these dance-sculpture pieces included Slant Board, See Saw, Rollers and a few more--the live works stole the show. Huddle and Scramble might hail from the touchy-feely, playful days of the '60s--evoking the groovy group-mind in motion--but their ideas and looks don't in the least feel ancient or alien to me. Their subtleties sing.

Huddle is just what its name says it is--a mound of dancers, with upperbacks bent and arms linked, who form a sensitive, living "rock" upon which one or another of them will clamber up, crawl across and climb down. The dancers below and the one above seem to orient themselves through listening to their bodies, not looking with their eyes. I loved, most of all, the way the dancers' hands, grasping for purchase and gently kneading the bodies below, seemed more like lizards' claws and the way each crawler eventually blended into the "rock" as another emerged from the huddle to climb. At BAC, most of the audience, seated on the floor surrounding the huddle, was close enough to feel pulled in and hypnotized.

With Huddle, as in other pieces, dancers escape the tyranny of propulsion by leg and foot--the walking, running, skipping, leaping into horizontal space so commonly, conventionally identified with the idea of dancing. By doing so, Forti expands our experience beyond the human into all of nature.

I could say something similar about the challenging distension of time in Accompaniment for La Monte's 2 sounds, a solo performed by Forti in the film. And it may be true. Forti takes us into a different dimension, a different living of time as she quietly dangles from a thick rope, sometimes slightly twisting and swaying. But I am a Black woman, and when I see that image--surely intended to be abstract--time reverts for me to the era of lynching.

Scramble--a dance as responsive in real time as Huddle--resembles a meeting of two schools of fish passing through each other, twisting in and out, towards and away. Dancers peeled off to the sidelines, eventually leaving a small, tight group that became wonderfully rambunctious.

Simone Forti explaining herself:

"Everywhere I looked, I looked at something designed by people, and I felt I was in a house of mirrors."


"Chubby Checker's 'Twist' brought a lot of us together!"

"Sometimes when I saw a dance, I'd say, 'There's so much movement, I can't see the body!"

About Huddle: "The weight passes through everybody else's body. The weight passes to the ground through this structure. We learn to not be afraid. Put your foot on somebody. Spread your weight."

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