Robert Wilson's Watermill Center Gala Honors Dance and Visual Artist Simone Forti

Eighty-eight-year-old Simone Forti watched by livestream as a restaged tribute of her iconic works was performed at The Watermill Center, where she was honored on July 29th. The Watermill Center Annual Summer Benefit celebrates distinguished individuals' accomplishments and honors them with an evening of art and experimentation to support the organization’s year-round programming. The Watermill Center’s 2023 benefit centered on the body’s role in art making. “the BODY” was a broad approach engendered by diverse cultures and mediums, including time-based performance, painting, sculpture, and video.

Simone Forti has been a pioneer in the fields of dance and visual art, one of the first to be proclaimed a “conceptual artist” for her style of creating performance pieces where the concept or idea for the art is just as important as the execution of the art. Ms. Forti has worked as a dancer, choreographer, artist, and writer. She is based in Los Angles and works on worldwide projects with Sarah Swenson.  Sarah Swenson is an American modern dance choreographer, dancer, and teacher who has been the International Project Coordinator and principal stager for Forti's 1960s opus Dance Constructions.

Forti has appeared in venues, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Louvre Museum, Paris; and Danspace, New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Centro Pecci, Prato (2021); Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan (2018); Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich (2017); Kunstmuseum, Bonn (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015), and her first major retrospective at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria, 2014. Forti’s artwork is in collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Generali Foundation; and The Whitney Museum of American Art. Forti has received various awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in dance in 2005, a Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts in 2011, and the Biennale Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Dance in 2023.

Sarah Swenson restaged four distinguished works by Forti with a dozen performers for the benefit. These pieces were performed throughout the evening on an elevated wooden stage surrounded by a forest of trees, some growing through the stage.

The works staged for the event included Huddle (created in 1961), Censor (created in 1961), Landscape Partners (created in 1970), and Scramble (created in 1970). The Watermill benefit performers have experience with The New York City Ballet, Broadway, and international dance troupes. The performers included: Eva Alt, Eliza Blutt, Caroline Breton, Bonnie Comley,  Mikayla Durham, Savannah Durham, Jonathan Fahoury, Xuetong "Cecilia" Feng, Kennard Henson, Marianna Kavallieratos, Sorin Prodea, Ava Sautter, and Demiân White.

The Watermill Center was founded in 1992 by theater and visual artist Robert Wilson.  The Watermill Center fosters research in the arts of the stage, providing emerging artists with a unique environment for creation and exploration in theater and all its related art forms and developing a robust global network transcending age, experience, and social, religious, and cultural backgrounds.  The Watermill Center supports projects that integrate different genres and art forms, break with traditional forms of representation, and develop democratic and cross-cultural approaches.

For more information on The Watermill Center, see: www.watermillcenter.org

Pictures: Eugene Gologursky

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