In conjunction with ISCP’s exhibition The Animal Mirror, Simone Forti will mark the 50th anniversary of her seminal work Sleep Walkers/Zoo Mantras with its first performance in New York since the 1970s.

Forti first performed the piece under the title Zoo Mantras in a 1968 solo event at Galleria L’Attico in Rome after spending many intense days observing animals in the Rome Zoo. Described by Forti as an “immersion in the kinesthetic sense,” the choreography is based on the zoo animals’ habitual movements and wrestles with the complexity of humans’ intuitive identification with animal life.

The performance will be followed by a conversation between Simone Forti and curator Kari Conte.

Simone Forti is a dancer, artist, writer based in Los Angeles. She came of age artistically in the 1960s, a time of rich dialog between poets, musicians, dancers and visual artists. Her early Dance Constructions were influential to the reinventing of dance in New York that happened in the 1960s and 1970s. Forti has collaborated extensively with musicians Peter Van Riper and Charlemagne Palestine, basing her dancing on studies of animals’ movements and on the dynamics of circling. Since the early 1980s Forti has been doing News Animations, improvisational moving and speaking speculations on world events. Forti’s book Handbook in Motion was published in 1974 by the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. (Distributed by the Contact Editions www.contactquarterly.com) Her book Oh, Tongue was edited and published by Fred Dewey for Beyond Baroque Books, in 2003. Forti has performed internationally at venues including the Louvre Museum in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York that also features some of her work in its permanent collection. Forti is proud that in 2011 she received the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts. She is represented by The Box LA Gallery.