Simone Forti died this week at 91. Hyperallergic's obituary describes a practice that mixed boundless curiosity with formal rigor: dance as sculpture, movement as score, the body as a site of knowledge production that operated entirely outside language. This week also brought news that Jane Schoenbrun's new film, reviewed in The New Yorker, is a cinematic manifesto about what it means to inhabit a body being reshaped by genre, by other people's expectations, by the franchises that structure experience before experience can happen. The connection is not accidental. Both Forti and Schoenbrun are asking what happens to embodied knowledge when external systems colonize the body's own language.
The Body as a Site That Resists Archiving
Forti's work is notoriously difficult to document. Performance resists the archive not because documentation is impossible but because the document is always a translation, and something is always lost in the translation. Hyperallergic's remembrance notes she kept working until near the end, treating the body not as a declining instrument but as an ongoing inquiry. This is a political position as much as an artistic one: to locate knowledge in the moving body is to insist on a form of intelligence that cannot be digitized, benchmarked, or optimized. A 2026 paper by Kai Yao in arXiv CS.CY, titled When AI Does the Work, What Is Learning For, argues that when AI systems produce the outputs of cognitive labor, the capacity for that labor slowly dissolves in the humans who outsource it. Forti spent sixty years doing the opposite: insisting that the doing was the knowing, that you could not outsource the movement without losing the thought.
Schoenbrun, Forti, and the Franchised Body
Schoenbrun's film follows a filmmaker tasked with rebooting a horror franchise, which is a story about what it feels like to have your creative body conscripted into someone else's genre. Forti spent her career refusing that conscription, working in spaces, scores, and tasks that generated movement from inside rather than imposing form from outside. The D&D getting World of Warcraft and Star Wars crossovers is a small but symptomatic note in the same score: even the structures for improvisation and embodied play are now getting franchised. Forti's death is a reminder of what that costs.