One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer

Praise for One Thing Follows Another

One Thing Follows Another provides valuable insights into the aesthetic evolution of Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, two of the major choreographers and thinkers in a postmodern world that would not be the same without them.
—Lucinda Childs, Choreographer

In this innovative and deeply considered essay collection, authors Rosenthal and Witte use both broad strokes and discerning detail to convey the importance of Simone Forti’s and Yvonne Rainer’s work. What’s more, they weave together research with deep introspection to create an intimate, caring connection to these two masters—a utopia often described but rarely enacted, a multi-valve opening of the heart. This book helps us learn the necessary means of our present and future survival: reaching toward each other, touching fingertips, holding hands.
—Tracie Morris, author of handholding 5 kinds: on the other hand

What is freedom? How does a free body move and sound? In One Thing Follows Another, Sarah Rosenthal and Valerie Witte address these questions by pursuing “open awareness” through the art of postmodern visionaries Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. Freedom is not simple. Forti and Rainer developed an audacious language of unlearning that recognizes oppressive structures; brings mind to the habitual; discovers a vernacular in caged animals, task work, children, chance, collaboration, and the implications of people moving together. The body is the beginning and the limit, “a huge cathedral : filled with space.” Rosenthal and Witte, intrepid explorers, bring this quest to the essay form. This book is kinetic and choreographed. It heaves, races, unfurls, quakes, stops, and somehow even billows. It’s an invitation to the dance.
—Robert Glück, author of About Ed

In One Thing Follows Another, Sarah Rosenthal and Valerie Witte offer us writerly perspectives on movement artists Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti. Here are rich essays of intersection and complexity, essays that interweave the authors’ own experiences as art/life practitioners to understand and nuance the revolutionary aspects of Rainer’s and Forti’s work. Respect and influence move as energetic shuttles through this collection. This book is a site of conversation––of time passing and terms changing, of clarification and memory, of dreams, plays, collage, pedagogy, letters, and poems––all played out against the exhilarating risk of dance in a complex world.
—Petra Kuppers, author of Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters

When I first encountered the work of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer many decades ago, I had no idea what it was about. I began to understand it as non-narrative poetic abstraction. One finds the meaning in themself and experiences reality differently after encountering this work. It is like walking down the street in New York City and seeing a flowerpot fall. The pot explodes onto the sidewalk. Shards fly and dirt scatters like a blast wave. As you approach the point of impact, you see a daisy lying there. You pick it up and take it home. In One Thing Follows Another, Witte and Rosenthal create this experience anew, translating Forti’s and Rainer’s ideas about movement onto the medium of the page. Even readers who think they already know the way these choreographers work will feel the shock wave. And then see the daisy. Pick it up. Take it home.
—Yoshiko Chuma, Artistic Director, The School of Hard Knocks, 1980–present

I thank Valerie Witte and Sarah Rosenthal for supporting the important work of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer through their probing study, One Thing Follows Another. I developed my own work alongside Forti and Rainer and recall many of the events retold in these pages. The main paradigms explored by the authors are as important today as they were then. We face a world verging on disembodied culture. Without these works and this fine book to help us, we run the risk of reinventing the wheel.
—Alison Knowles, Founding Member, Fluxus Movement

In One Thing Follows Another, Rosenthal and Witte find visceral, evocative ways to explore the herstories of Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti. Embodying the spirit and approach of these choreographers and their teacher/mentor Anna Halprin, the authors take us on a personal/artistic/political/herstorical dance with words that had me laughing, crying, and recognizing evocations of the Halprin Studio then and our life/art work over time. One note follows another, one piece of masterful research follows another in this stunning score-eography. You will be swept up by it––and learn a lot along the way about incredible women making a new movement that continues to impact us.
—Daria Halprin, Co-Founder, Tamalpa Institute

One Thing Follows Another is both a celebration of the postmodern dance choreographers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer and an investigation into the social and cultural implications of their work. Drawing from autobiography, dance scholarship, memoir, poetry, and continental philosophy, Witte and Rosenthal track their own encounters with the performances and reflections of Forti and Rainer, deploying the liberatory feminism implicit in the choreographers’ work to explore familial (Rosenthal’s wedding), social (homelessness), and cultural (the musical Pippin) “dance” performances. At the core of these essays is the female body’s objecthood as defined by ballet and certain modes of modern dance, and its eventual freeing from professionalism thanks to the pioneering work of Forti, Rainier, and their peers. At the authors’ invitation, the two choreographers, especially Rainer, push back against some of the authors’ conclusions, and their emendations make One Thing Follows Another a four-way conversation about our bodies and what it means to move through private and public spaces.
—Tyrone Williams, coauthor of washpark

In One Thing Follows Another, authors Rosenthal and Witte combine musings and memories with research to dynamically interact with the work of Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, capturing the energy of the choreographers’ personalities and work in the process.We get to know Forti’s tone of voice along with whatever we may already know of her dancing. Rainer’s emphatic redefinition of virtuosity (“…had nothing to do with feminism!”) sits alongside the (unabashedly feminist) authors’ experiences of teaching and dancing, creating a sense of inclusiveness and permission—we don’t have to agree in order to inhabit a stage or a page together. We are taken by Rainer’s offer to trust that the pre-work can be part of the work-work, to note how we frame this dancing we love. Inspiring! I feel the jolt myself––the urge to get up from my desk and dance, noting what I as mover, maker, and thinker carry from the past and what I begin now. The invitation to inhabit our bodies just as they are, “judgments checked at the door,” is too delicious to pass up.
—Bebe Miller, Choreographer and Artistic Director, Bebe Miller Company

Via innovation and collaboration, Sarah Rosenthal and Valerie Witte’s boundary-defying collection refigures writing about dance. Even as they conjure the transformative powers of transmission from one generation of artists to the next, they document the ever-elusive nature of performance and practice, recognizing “what it means to be an artist who wants and needs to morph their thinking over time.” One Thing Follows Another honors its central subjects, Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, while opening the field of the essay to what grid, gesture, and syllable make possible.
—Karla Kelsey, author of On Certainty

Infusing academic research with a spirit of experimentation and play, Sarah Rosenthal and Valerie Witte immerse themselves in the complexity of Simone Forti’s and Yvonne Rainer’s iconic works. The authors employ multidisciplinary methodologies and intersubjective experiences, with the footnote exchanges between them and Rainer offering intimate insight. Ranging from the scholarly to the deeply personal, these essays inform, perplex, inspire, and challenge us to dive into the unknown and find our own way, as did the innovative pioneers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer.
—Donna Uchizono, Artistic Director, Donna Uchizono Company

One Thing Follows Another is more than a collection of essays about two singular artists whose radical ideas forever changed the discipline of dance. This book is an exploration of the way reality unfolds and evolves in unexpected ways, in the lives of Forti and Rainer, of Rosenthal and Witte––and of myself. So many instances in my reading of this strangely beautiful book brought me to my own stories, held in my body, waiting. These essays reaffirmed one thing I learned from the Postmodernists––that time is not linear. Neither is the intricate, strong yet vulnerable writing within this book. One thing may follow another but not in any predictable way; experience spirals and returns, suddenly rediscovered. Truly an inspiring adventure.
—K.J. Holmes, Independent Dance Artist

In One Thing Follows Another, Rosenthal and Witte reveal and revel in the seams of process, articulating and inspiring the role of relationship—those multivalent collaborations of ongoingness between the self and other artists at the intersection of various disciplines, narratives, and creative lineages. Engaging the work and lives of Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, the authors employ chance, experimentation, and desire as compositional tools for immersion in the “exquisite and ordinary.” Part poetics, part biography, part ontological inquiry, this book includes dreams, erasures, chance encounters, poetry, creative prompts, letters, interviews, and performance/procedure descriptions that unfetter prescribed boundaries between process, rehearsal, performance, and “real” life. This accomplished and visionary book allows us to think, feel, and play our way toward curious relationality, embodying the authors’ keen urging for immersive praxis and inviting us to enter the text as “a dance floor … potentially, ostensibly, for wild abandon.”
—Serena Chopra, Interdisciplinary Artist

These stunningly written essays interweave the authors’ own lived experiences with an examination of Forti’s and Rainer’s work––its history and contemporary relevance. As Witte and Rosenthal explore these avant-garde artists’ contributions across disciplines and movements including feminism, Fluxus, and Happenings, they create a quilt of multiple colors and textures, layered with meaning and leading to revelatory and deeply provocative discoveries. To borrow the authors’ description of these artists’ work, this book “holds up a loving mirror that invites us to inhabit our bodies and daily lives fully.”
—Margaret Jenkins, Founder and Artistic Director, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company