Exhibition Expanded: L'orecchio di Dionisio

In 2012 Simone Forti participated in the exhibition Moments. A History of Performance in 10 Acts at the ZKM | Center for Arts and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. As part of the public program related to the show, Forti was invited to do a talk where she spoke about her relation to Anna Halprin and Judson Dance Theater as well as Face Tunes, the work presented in the exhibition. At the end of the lecture the artist demonstrates the use of the modified slide whistle to read the score and perform the sound experimentation.

In a recent interview published on BOMB, Forti discussed her works related to music and sound with Tashi Wada. The expansive conversation touches on key moments in Simone's life and practice, click here to read the full article.

Tashi Wada​: Regarding that idea of momentum and trajectory, it feels to me that your sound works are directed but not really composed. Something gets it going and drives it on, but the materials are left to be themselves. This might relate to the Dance Constructions. You set up circumstances, but within them it’s open-ended.

Simone Forti: I’m not directing dancers to make this or that movement. Instead I’m keeping them from falling into zombie mode and keeping things from getting too interesting. I make it clear what kind of presence I’m looking for—and one clue for them is being aware of interesting compositional things happening without trying to make those interesting compositional things happen. It now occurs to me that sound may be another arbitrary object, an element I’ve brought in or that has just happened. So there hasn’t been a series of a certain kind of exploration of sound, but rather almost arbitrary ideas that came up, like Face Tunes (1967).

TW: In comparison to the rest of the pieces on Al Di Là, Face Tunes, in which you transcribe outlines of facial profiles into melodies, is interesting because it almost exists in a more conceptual space, as far as the sound goes and what the audience is hearing or experiencing.

SF: I had traced a series of faces in profile onto a scroll, which rolled by as I followed the lines with a stylus attached to a slide whistle. Originally the audience didn’t even know these were tracings of faces. They were repetitive units that were similar but different.

Throughout her decades-long career exploring movement and dance, Forti has collaborated with a number of musicians and composers, including La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, who are featured in one of the parts of Bottom (1973) as well as Yoshi Wada, Tashi's father. Simone Forti's work with American composer and artist Charlemagne Palestine is among her most celebrated.

After meeting Palestine at CalArts in 1970, the two began collaborating on Illuminations, a series of performances based on the use of a common language between Forti’s circular motions and Palestine’s melodies. In conjunction with the choreography, Forti made a series of drawings in 1972 based on circles and numerology that functioned as scores for her and Palestine’s performances. Exploring the concept of improvisation and the dynamics of the circle, including centrifugal and centripetal forces, the drawings illustrate the duality of mental process and movement.

In 2016 Simone Forti and Charlemagne Palestine used Vleeshal as a rehearsal space to work on a new version of their Illuminations series, which was performed there on April 2 and April 3. Both Forti and Palestine had performed in Middelburg before: Forti in 1980, when she participated in the interdisciplinary arts festival ‘Forum’, and Charlemagne Palestine on several occasions, including a solo show at Vleeshal in 1979 as well as various other concerts in Middelburg.