One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer
Sarah Rosenthal, Valerie Witte
- Afterword by Ralph Lemon
Published on March 28, 2025 by punctum books
- Pages
- 214 pages
- Languages
- English
- Dimensions
- 7⤫10 in.
- ISBN (Paperback)
- ISBN: 978-1-68571-188-7 (Paperback)
- ISBN (PDF)
- ISBN: 978-1-68571-189-4 (PDF)
- LCCN
- LCCN: 2025934121
- BISAC subject codes
- BISAC: ART065000, PER003040, POE024000
- Thema subject codes
- THEMA: 6JC, 6PD, ATQT, DCC
In the 1950s, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, and a handful of other young artists based in New York’s Greenwich Village set out to challenge the practices and principles of professionalized dance. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of choreographers Anna Halprin, Robert Dunn, and Merce Cunningham, as well as composer John Cage, they were determined to change what dance is and can be. In One Thing Follows Another, a boundary-crossing collection of ten experimental-poetic essays, poets Valerie Witte and Sarah Rosenthal explore the work of dancer-choreographers Rainer and Forti, both at various inflection points throughout their careers and in this particular moment.
Through a combination of chance operations and intentional artistic choices that push the authors to unexpected places—including the zoo, the dance studio, the street corner—and via innovative forms and techniques, such as collage, erasure, and their own artistic inventions, they deconstruct the essay form to examine what they as poets, each with their own highly charged relationships to dance, can contribute to the conversation about these pivotal figures in postmodern performance art.
Biographies
Sarah Rosenthal(opens in new tab) is the author of Estelle Meaning Star (Chax, 2024), Lizard (Chax, 2016), Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), and several chapbooks. In collaboration with Valerie Witte, she has published the hybrid work The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (Operating System, 2019). She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Poets of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010). Her short film We Agree on the Sun has received numerous accolades on the film festival circuit, including Best Experimental Short at the 2021 Berlin Independent Film Festival. She is the recipient of the Leo Litwak Fiction Award, a Creative Capacity Innovation Grant, a San Francisco Education Fund Grant, and writing residencies at Cel del Nord, This Will Take Time, Hambidge, Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, Ragdale, and New York Mills. She lives in San Francisco, where she manages projects for the Center for the Collaborative Classroom, works as a life and professional coach, and serves on the California Book Awards poetry jury.
Valerie Witte(opens in new tab) is the author of A Rupture in the Interiors (Airlie Press, 2023) and a game of correspondence (Black Radish, 2015). In collaboration with Sarah Rosenthal, she has published the hybrid work The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (Operating System, 2019) and she has published multiple chapbooks, most recently Listening Through the Body (above/ground press, 2021). Her work has also appeared in literary publications such as VOLT, Diagram, Dusie, and Interim. Her previous collaborations include projects with artist Jennifer Yorke, who produced two artist books based on Witte’s manuscript Flood Diary, and an installation based on her manuscript A Rupture in the Interiors. The works were exhibited in Berkeley and Chicago, respectively, and their collaboration included a residency at La Porte Peinte Center for the Arts in Noyers, France. Witte has also attended residencies at the Hambidge Center and Ragdale Foundation and is a founding member of the Bay Area Correspondence School. She edits education technology books in Portland, Oregon, where she lives with her husband Andrew.
Endorsements
Lucinda Childs
choreographer
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.
Tracie Morris
author of handholding 5 kinds: on the other hand
This book helps us learn the necessary means of our present and future survival: reaching toward each other, touching fingertips, holding hands.
Donna Uchizono
Artistic Director, Donna Uchizono Company
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.
Robert Glück
author of About Ed and I, Boombox
This book is kinetic and choreographed. It heaves, races, unfurls, quakes, stops, and somehow even billows. It’s an invitation to the dance.
Daria Halprin
Co-Founder, Tamalpa Institute
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.
Petra Kuppers
author of Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters
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.
Tyrone Williams
co-author of washpark
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…. [This book is] a four-way conversation about our bodies and what it means to move through private and public spaces.
Additional resources
In anticipation of the book One Thing Follows Another, punctum hosted a double feature of Sarah Rosenthal's films Lizard Song and We Agree on the Sun with a post-screening panel discussion.
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Genres
- Art+Aesthetics
- Fabulations
Keywords
- collaborative poetics
- dance
- poetic practice
- postmodern art
- Simone Forti
- Yvonne Rainer