Forti’s ‘Logomotion’ Connects Humans, Nature

Scattering sections of The Times across the stage of Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica on Sunday, postmodern matriarch Simone Forti scans them with a flashlight and walks on them as if they were steppingstones to some undetermined destination--”maybe Hawaii,” she says. She then arranges them to suggest global land masses--”Let’s make the Persian Gulf here”--and traces “the estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates” from the stage floor up through her body onto the back wall and ceiling.

That’s how Forti sees human beings: physically connected to the natural world and deeply aligned with its contours and processes, whether she stretches out to encompass the cradle of civilization or scrunches up to depict the sharp angles of the Alps. “Sometimes I feel like a hair on the head of the Earth,” she says, and her hourlong performance piece “Logomotion” conveys that feeling through disarming improvisational speech and motion as well as video clips.

Telling and retelling a backyard anecdote, she suddenly stops talking as a powerful movement impulse seizes her and completes the description without words. Such moments are revelations because they not only confirm that at sixtysomething Forti remains in touch with the most profound resources of her art, but they refute the truism that when speech and dance share a stage, speech always dominates. With Forti, talk is invariably entertaining, but it’s movement that makes the primal expressive statements and keeps the performance from ever becoming a sentimental touchy-feely indulgence.

Thus she can make a beguiling little patter song out of what she thinks a group of jackdaws chatter to one another at the end of a day, but depicts with startling immediacy the churning movement of an icy brook waking up to spring or, in a final visionary physicalization, the experience of becoming absorbed by the sunlight in a valley--not just watching it, but part of it.

An excerpt from “I Am Nature,” her video collaboration with her first dance mentor, Anna Halprin, completes the program with glimpses of Forti dancing amid forest streams and giant redwoods: utterly in her element as woman and artist.