AN ETHIC CLAD IN GENES

One day, some years ago, the choreographer Simone Forti went to the Bronx Zoo to observe a herd of Pere David deer, recent imports from China. A fawn had been born just two hours earlier and as Forti was watching she saw the biggest member of the herd thunder across the plain, charging at the newborn fawn.

“He leaped straight into the air, right in front of the baby and landed right where he had jumped up and then went trotting off,” she recently recalled. “The little fawn was left completely startled and stunned and I thought, well, what is this?”

“From the point of view of the baby,” says the 51-year-old Forti, whose own improvised dances have often been based on such startling natural imagery, “it was probably the first time it had focused its eyes outward. It must have gotten an enormous adrenaline rush as it imprinted this frightening figure. Now it knew who the boss was and could run to it if it had to. This had been the fawn’s initiation and yet it was completely based on an illusion that was presented to it. It was theater.”

Whether crawling or writhing across a dance floor, slithering amidst other dancers who might be bears or monkeys or even humans, directing one of her trademark “huddles” or simply teaching young dancers to find movement from their own observations of animal behavior, Forti has always thought out what she calls “our generic link” to either primitive human behavior or the activities of animals.

Los Angeles audiences will once again have the chance to watch this seminal figure of post-modern dance during a weeklong teaching residency that will end with a performance by Forti and her students at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) on May 30.

Forti’s career has never been based solely on her achievements as a choreographer. Indeed, while her dances have been performed all over the world for the last 20 years, Forti is now known almost more for her teaching than her performing. The improvisational structures and amateur naturalism that mark her work have now become as essential to many dancers as classes in formal technique.

In her classes and her performances, Forti’s forte has always been close observation of the inadvertent pattern of movement created by simple animal intuition. Students are not only taught to move like lumbering bears, rolling rocks or growing daffodils pushing out from under those rocks, but are also taught to absorb the behavioral dynamics that create so-called natural forces.

Thus, Forti focuses not only on a bear’s lumbering gait but also on its predatory aggression; the mating call of a female goose is seen not only as a cry for interaction but also as the basis for inquiring into the inherent polygamy of geese and, by implication, the social ritual of human relationships.

If such observation and study take time and simple patience, she is proud of these traits and critical of the way in which the current dance scene makes such study so difficult.

“One thing I think is so insidious about the dance world is that it is so competitive, so very fast, that it makes you move as fast as you can, work as fast as you can, think as fast as you can, walk as fast as you can, make phone calls as fast as you can, and it just puts you in that very fast gear all the time. I think it makes you have a kind of dumb perspective on life.”

It was not a perspective Forti cherished--even zoos would be better than this, she thought--and so, for several years Forti confined most of her activities to a blend of anthropological research, study with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, a specialist in the development of brain-damaged children, and her own dancing.

Over the past few years, however, even that work has turned out to be problematic. “I came to the point where I couldn’t stand the zoo anymore,” Forti exclaims. “I could understand my initial interest in the zoo because it seemed simple and didn’t tax my brain too much. But in some ways, I felt I too was sort of trapped in a zoo, in a mind cage--not looking at the whole picture of behavior as it interacts in the world. I wasn’t really bonding with my performance work.”

A new source for examining human and animal behavior came from an old and unexpected place--the newspaper. “I’m now doing what I call ‘news animations,’ ” Forti says with a wily smile. “I literally dance the news, and I’ve been keeping track of all the topics and connections. I do a free-association monologue and while I’m talking, I make these strange kinetic connections: I see the oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and then I see the human waves of Iraqis and Iranians and then I see the oil derricks pumping oil and then I see the Ayatollah. I become these forces. I’ve found my way at last to representational work, but in a truly kinetic way.”

For someone whose career as a choreographer first began from an interest in Abstract Expressionist painting, such a shift, from the tradition of abstraction to that of figuration has meant a drastic reappraisal of her career.

“At a certain point,” says the master teacher, “I asked myself, well, now that we’ve got this language from the dance traditions of the ‘60s, what are we going to say with it? Because rather than being a searching for statements, dance started to be just stylistic and academic and concerned with technical proficiency.

“I finally realized I wanted to talk about things ,” she says with a sigh. “For a while, I even tried writing. But now, with these funny little newspaper animation things, I think I’m finally beginning to bond with my performing self once again.”