Skip to main content
Back to search
  • Add to playlist

Dance Construction - Huddle [à l'extérieur]

CN D - Centre national de la danse 2015 - Director : Centre national de la danse, Réalisation

Choreographer(s) : Forti, Simone (United States)

Present in collection(s): CN D - Spectacles et performances

Video producer : Centre national de la danse

Integral video available at CND de Pantin

en fr

Dance Construction - Huddle [à l'extérieur]

CN D - Centre national de la danse 2015 - Director : Centre national de la danse, Réalisation

Choreographer(s) : Forti, Simone (United States)

Present in collection(s): CN D - Spectacles et performances

Video producer : Centre national de la danse

Integral video available at CND de Pantin

en fr

Dance Constructions

Before moving to New York in 1959, choreographer Simone Forti spent four heady, formative years in San Francisco. There, she trained with the postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin, who rejected the stylistic constraints of ballet and modern dance. On Halprin’s outdoor dance deck in wooded Marin County, Forti explored improvisation, her motions guided  by a keen alertness to the body’s anatomy. She also organized open-work sessions with her then husband, the Minimalist artist Robert Morris,  gathering artists for communal, multidisciplinary explorations of movement, objects, sound, and light. 

At the end of the decade, Forti and Morris moved east. In New York, she began developing the pieces she eventually called Dance Constructions: dances based around ordinary movement, chance, and simple objects like rope and plywood boards. First performed in 1960 at the Reuben Gallery in Soho, and then in Yoko Ono’s loft the following year, they marked “a  watershed moment when the relationship between bodies and objects, movement and sculpture, was being fundamentally rethought,” says Stuart  Comer, Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art. Dancers balanced on seesaws, embraced in a huddle of bodies, and stood still in hanging  loops of rope. They needed only to abide Forti’s “rule games” but were  otherwise free to improvise gestures as they negotiated the object  before them. Per Forti’s principles, these gestures were “pedestrian,” lacking the arch stylization and technical finesse of traditional dance forms. In doing so, as Morris later noted, these pieces “attacked the  notion of dance as a format that required the trained body of the dancer.”

Over the past half-century, Forti’s seven Dance Constructions have been performed by dancers around the world.

Source: website of the MoMa museum / New York

Forti, Simone

SIMONE FORTI is a dancer, choreographer, artist and writer based in Los Angeles. She started dancing in 1955 with improvisational dance pioneer Anna Halprin. In 1959 she moved to New York, where she studied composition, particularly John Cage’s work, in the Merce Cunningham Studio with musicologist Robert Dunn and familiarised herself with random practice. She met Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton and actively collaborated to initial happenings, mainly with Robert Whitman, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow while conceiving her first minimalist conceptual dance/constructions. In 1961 she presented her Dance Constructions, which influenced the emergence of the Judson Dance Theatre, which revolutionised dance in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout her prolific career Forti took an interest in the study of the movements of animals and the dynamics of circling, as well as in the natural, geographical or historical ‘portraits’ of specific venues that she created with the group Forti & Troupe that she founded in 1986. She collaborated with musicians/composers such as Charlemagne Palestine and Peter Van Riper. Since the early 1980s, Forti has been performing News Animations, a blend of movements and spoken words referring to world news. She received many awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 and the Yoko Ono Lennon Award for Courage for the Arts in 2011. Today Forti continues teaching and performing worldwide while inventing original devices to explore movement. Her work has been featured at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the MoMa in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the Louvre Museum in Paris among others.

Centre national de la danse, Réalisation

Since 2001, the National Center for Dance (CND) has been making recordings of its shows and educational programming and has created resources from these filmed performances (interviews, danced conferences, meetings with artists, demonstrations, major lessons, symposia specialized, thematic arrangements, etc.).

Dance Construction - Huddle

Artistic direction / Conception : Simone Forti

Choreography : Simone Forti

Interpretation : Agnès Dru, Isabelle Brunaud, Ida Faho, Lyon-Eun Kwon, Mabintou Camara, Marie-Charlotte Chevalier, Zoé Philibert, Stéphanie Verin, Alexia Casciaro, Joshua Boyle

Production / Coproduction of the video work : Enregistré au CND le 29 juin 2015 dans le cadre de Camping 2015

Duration : 4 minutes (à l'intérieur) / 6 minutes (à l'extérieur)

Our videos suggestions
01:46

Grand Finale

Shechter, Hofesh (United Kingdom)

  • Add to playlist
02:58

Un casse-noisette

Tchouda, Bouba Landrille (France)

  • Add to playlist
44:48

Workshop of Sophie Lessard for the students of the CNDC's school (Angers)

  • Add to playlist
08:02

I think

  • Add to playlist
14:53

Counterpoint

  • Add to playlist
04:04

Cabaret Heels

  • Add to playlist
09:18

Accumulation

  • Add to playlist
06:08

Kwa Zulu Natal

  • Add to playlist
08:32

Signs and forms Perpetual Motion

  • Add to playlist
15:26

Look at me again!

  • Add to playlist
16:10

Boléro

  • Add to playlist
05:32

Sing Sing

Carlès, James (France)

  • Add to playlist
09:01

Canon 1

  • Add to playlist
03:42

Primavera

Senatore, Ambra (France)

  • Add to playlist
45:33

The Leaf [outside]

Huynh, Emmanuelle (France)

  • Add to playlist
15:34

Cinderella

Malandain, Thierry (France)

  • Add to playlist
20:08

Workshop 2016

  • Add to playlist
06:18

La Belle et la Bête - Le Bal - Ballet T

Malandain, Thierry (France)

  • Add to playlist
17:05

Salida [transmission 2015]

Le Batard, Anne (France)

  • Add to playlist
12:47

East Land - Cabaret nomade [transmission 2015]

Petit, William (France)

  • Add to playlist
Our themas suggestions

DANCE AND DIGITAL ARTS

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

K. Danse's artistic partners

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Animal Kingdom, participant's words

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Roots of Diversity in Contemporary Dance

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

(LA)HORDE: RESIST TOGETHER

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Les Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Vlovajobpru company

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Indian dances

Discover Indian dance through choreographic creations which unveil it, evoke it, revisit it or transform it!

Parcours

fr/en/

Amala Dianor: dance to let people see

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Body and conflicts

A look on the bonds which appear to emerge between the dancing body and the world considered as a living organism.

Parcours

fr/en/

James Carlès

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

When reality breaks in

How does choreographic works are testimonies of the world? Does the contemporary artist is the product of an era, of its environment, of a culture?

Parcours

fr/en/

Do you mean Folklores?

Presentation of how choreographers are revisiting Folklore in contemporary creations.

Parcours

fr/en/

The Dance Biennial Défilé

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Maison de la danse

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Dancing bodies

Focus on the variety of bodies offered by contemporary dance and how to show these bodies: from complete nudity to the body completely hidden or covered.

Parcours

fr/en/

EIVV 2022 Dancing with the camera

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

EIVV 2022 Dancing with the editing

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Why do I dance ?

Social dances, anti-establishment, protest dances, rhythms or identities, rituals or pleasures... There are a myriad of reasons for dancing and a myriad of points of view. A webdoc to discover, enhanced with extracts from performances and accounts from amateurs... all the right reasons for dancing!

Webdoc

fr/en/

Käfig, portrait of a company

Webdoc

fr/en/
By accessing the website, you acknowledge and accept the use of cookies to assist you in your browsing.
You can block these cookies by modifying the security parameters of your browser or by clicking onthis link.
I accept Learn more