2014 Honoree Bios
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Mark Russell has been working in the downtown dance/performance and theater world for over 30years. From 1983-2004 he was the Executive Artistic Director of Performance Space 122. He brought the space from a low-tech artist rental space to a world renowned presenting institution committed to developing the work of New York City artists. In January 2005 Russell launched the Under the Radar Festival at St. Ann’s Warehouse. UTR focuses on theater based contemporary performance. The festival moved to the Public Theater in 2006 and has become a centerpiece in the New York City theater season; mixing international performances with national and local artists. Russell has been involved with many artists over his career, creating opportunities for them to grow and reach wider audiences. Currently Russell lives in Lausanne, Switzerland with his wife Jennifer Goodale and son Nicholas. |
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Simone Forti is a dancer/choreographer/ writer. Born in Florence, Italy, in 1935, she immigrated to the United States with her family in 1939 and grew up In Los Angeles. She moved to San Francisco in 1955 and began dancing with Anna Halprin who was doing pioneering work in dance improvisation. After studying and performing with Halprin in the San Francisco Bay area for four years, Forti moved to New York where she studied composition at the Merce Cunningham Studio with musician/musicologist Robert Dunn who was introducing dancers to the scores of John Cage. In these classes she met and began to work informally with choreographers like Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, and Steve Paxton. This was a time of active communication between artists, poets, musicians and dancers, and she counted among her close colleagues, composer La Monte Young, artist Robert Morris and poet Jackson Mac Low. |
Over the years, returning to improvisation as her basic way of working, Forti has focused on many areas of exploration. In the 1970s and early 80s, in collaboration with musician Peter Van Riper, her improvising was anchored in observations of animals' movements. And in collaboration with musician Charlemagne Palestine, Forti focused on explorations of the dynamics of circling. Since the early 1980s she has been developing Logomotion, an improvisational dance-narrative form wherein movement and words spontaneously weave together in a poetic synergistic process. Forti often takes the news as her subject mater and calls these Logomotion performances News Animations. She has performed these as solos, or in collaboration with colleagues, at venues including, in Los Angeles, The Getty Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center and The Box LA Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art in New York and internationally in venues in Dublin, Marseilles, Rome and Berlin.
These evolving modes of work have given rise to many drawings, which have been exhibited at The Box Gallery in Los Angeles, at the David Zwirner Gallery and the Fitzroy Gallery in New York and in Zurich at the Hauser & Wirth Gallery. They have also dovetailed with collaborations with pioneer of integral holography, Lloyd Cross, and the resulting holograms have been exhibited at venues including the Sonnabend Gallery in New York, and in the Into the Light exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The holographic pieces Striding Crawling, and Angel, are in the permanent collections, respectively, of the Whitney Museum, New York, and the Stdelijk Museum, Amsterdam. She is represented by The Box LA Gallery.
Forti’s book, Handbook in Motion: an account of an ongoing personal discourse and its manifestations in dance, was published in 1974 by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design as part of their Source Materials of the Contemporary Arts series. It was republished in French translation, as Manuel en Mouvement, in 2000 by Contredanse, Belgium. Forti’s book, Oh, Tongue, was edited by Fred Dewey who published it for Beyond Baroque Books, Los Angeles, in 2003.
Forti is regularly an adjunct professor on the dance faculty at UCLA. She has received many awards and fellowships over the years including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1995 she received The Bessie Dance and Performance award for sustained achievement, from Dance Theater Workshop in New York. In 2003 she received the Lester Horton Award for Lifetime Achievement, from the Dance Resource Center of Greater Los Angeles. In 2005 Forti was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in dance, and in 2011 she received a Yoko Ono Lennon Award for Courage in the Arts.
