[2][3][4] Forti first apprenticed with Anna Halprin in the 1950s and has since worked alongside artists and composers Nam June Paik, Steve Paxton, La Monte Young, Trisha Brown, Charlemagne Palestine, Peter Van Riper, Dan Graham, Yoshi Wada, Robert Morris and others.

Forti's published books include Handbook in Motion (1974, The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design), Angel (1978, self-published), and Oh Tongue (2003, Beyond Baroque Foundation, ed.

While also working as a nursery school teacher during the day,[1] Forti enrolled in a composition and improvisation class at the Merce Cunningham Studio, taught by educator/musicologist Robert Ellis Dunn.

Using a rope to scale a steep ramp in Slant Board, for instance, evokes a typical climbing movement, but you've turned it to an isolated action that lacks a purpose, that exists just for itself.

Performers that night included Forti, Ruth Allphon, Marni Mahaffay, Robert Morris, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and Carl Lehmann-Haupt.

"[11] Stuart Comer, the Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at MOMA, New York, has said that the exhibitions of Dance Constructions at the Reuben Gallery and Yoko Ono's loft were "a watershed moment when the relationship between bodies and objects, movement and sculpture, was being fundamentally rethought.

"[2] Dancer Steve Paxton also wrote, "All I know is that this small, radical group of works by Forti was like a pebble tossed into a large, still, and complacent pond.

Most notably, Forti's event happened prior to the first performance at Judson Memorial Church by the choreographers from Robert Dunn's composition class, and they took courage from it.

"[3] (2014) In December 2015, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the Dance Constructions as part of their permanent collection in the Department of Media and Performance.

[14][15] Forti began working with gallerist Fabio Sargentini, whose gallery, L'Attico, was a gathering point for Arte Povera artists at the time.

By segmenting and then repeating small passages of movement, for instance by isolating a few steps out of the flow of the elephant's many other motions, she creates an almost musical sense of pause, interval and tempo.

[14] Forti ended up staying in Woodstock, New York, for a year, living communally and experimenting with LSD, which she wrote about in her 1974 book Handbook in Motion.

Her housemates at the time were artists Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, and musician Peter Van Riper, her future husband.

In 2021, Illuminations Revisted was performed at Il Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy, with Sarah Swenson interpreting in Forti's absence.

[14] The book also contains photographs, poems, and drawings, as well as copied pages from Forti's journals and notebooks and has been translated into French and has been published in 2nd and 3rd editions in English.

Forti and Van Riper were married at the end of 1974, and lived together in SoHo in a Fluxhouse Co-Operative loft on Broadway, an artist live-work complex organized by George Maciunas.

[1] Big Room consisted of Van Riper playing music (typically on a saxophone) and Forti simultaneously performing movements based on her observations of animals, similar to her 1968 work, Sleep Walkers (alternatively titled Zoo Mantras).

[1] In 1976, Van Riper introduced Forti to physicist and artist Lloyd Cross,[23] who was developing pioneering work in holography in San Francisco.

She mentions, for instance, 'the big cats' compulsive pacing at the fence, which seemed to provide a modicum of relief, and writes that it gave her 'a new view of what it was that I was doing when I was dancing.'

Movement is, for the animals as well as for her, a method of control and redirected awareness: 'At times I've escaped an oppressive sense of fragmentation by plunging my consciousness into cyclical momentum.

[6][28] Performers included David Appel, Sally Banes, Pooh Kaye, and Terrence O'Reilly, Nina Martin, Eric Hess, among others.

Forti continued to teach dance workshops and develop new work in her Broadway loft in the years immediately following her separation from Van Riper in 1981.

"[31] In 1988, Forti bought a cabin at Mad Brook Farm in East Charleston, Vermont, a small community that was settled into by a group of artists during the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s,[34] where her longtime friend and collaborator Steve Paxton already lived.

The richly physical activity of gardening encourages daydream speculations and I was fascinated with the strategies of certain plants, especially the herbs, to take over their neighbors' territories.

[1] After living at Mad Brook Farm for ten years, Forti returned to Los Angeles in 1998 to be with and help care for her mother Milka.

[1] In July 2005, Forti was invited to perform at the REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater) in downtown Los Angeles as part of their annual New Original Works (NOW) Festival.

[41] With collaborators writer/improv artist Terrence Luke Johnson, dancer/choreographer Sarah Swenson, and musician/composer Douglas Wadle, Forti performed the dance/theater piece Unbuttoned Sleeves.

[5] Jeremiah Day, Fred Dewey, and Simone Forti traveled to London in May 2009 to attend and perform at the book launch party for Jeremiah Day/Simone Forti (2009, Project Press),[43] a book that was developed from the exhibition Simone Forti/Jeremiah Day "News Animations"/"No Words For You, Springfield'", which ran from March 27 to May 3, 2008, at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin.

Forti, Day, and Dewey performed and exhibited several more times together as a trio from 2009–2015,[5] including at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMOA) in 2014[45] and at Errant Bodies in Berlin, Germany, in 2012.

[47] An accompanying catalogue, Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body, with essays by Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Fred Dewey, Robert Morris, curator Sabine Breitwieser, Meredith Morse, and Julia Bryan-Wilson, was published in 2014 by Hirmer.