Simone Forti, Batyah Schachter: News Animation

Together with Israeli dancer Batyah Schachter, Simone Forti will present a new performance from her ongoing series of “News Animations” at Moderna Museet Stockholm, organized in collaboration with Index. Since the early 1980s, Forti has been performing “News Animations,” improvisations that continue her ongoing interest in political thought and the body as a medium of experience.

Assisted by a pile of newspapers, Forti and Schachter speak and move, spontaneously interweaving the flickering, fluid vision of the world brought to us by news media, with the their personal experiences and speculations. With only a few objects on stage, text and bodies in motion play off each other, sparking questions, silences, and bursts of energy. Writing, which is otherwise a component of preparation for performances, is read to the audience as part of the performance. Forti and Schachter have performed together before on many occasions, among others at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, 2012.

Simone Forti is an internationally acclaimed dancer, choreographer, artist, and writer based in Los Angeles. She was a seminal figure in the Judson Dance Theater community that revolutionized dance in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Forti has performed and taught in the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, and South America. Her works and performances were featured in exhibitions and museums worldwide, most recently at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Hammer Museum Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art New York, Guggenheim Museum, Sao Paulo Biennale and Louvre Paris. Her publications include, among others, Handbook in Motion: An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations in Dance (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Press, Halifax 1974) and Oh, Tongue!, edited and published by Fred Dewey (Beyond Baroque Books, Los Angeles 2003). In 2011 she received the prestigious Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award in the Arts.

Batyah Schachter is a dancer and choreographer, born in Israel. She graduated from the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam and collaborated since then with musicians and dancers in improvisation and created and performed solo dances in Europe and Israel. Since 1988, she is collaborating with Simone Forti. Schachter is a faculty member at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance since 1998 and a doctorate student at The Hebrew University, writing her thesis on movement and dance representations in the art of the Ancient Near East.

Social media: @indexstockholm #simoneforti #hereitcomes

The event is organized in the context of the exhibitions Simone Forti: Here It Comes. Works and Collaborations at Index and Objects and Bodies at Rest and in Motion at Moderna Museet Malmö, which will open on 26 September 2015. Objects and Bodies… aims at examining the relationship between objects and the human body in the works of minimalist artists and choreographers, including Simone Forti. This exhibition will travel to Moderna Museet in Stockholm in spring 2016.

Location: Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Admission: free