and around San Francisco, along with other members of the Dancer's Workshop, including A.A. Leath and John Graham. Through the Dancer's Workshop, Forti also taught children's and adult's dance workshops throughout Marin County. New York and Dance Constructions In 1959, Forti moved to New York with Morris. While also working as a nursery school teacher during the day, Forti enrolled in a composition and improvisation class at the Merce Cunningham Studio, taught by educator/musicologist Robert Ellis Dunn. These classes introduced Forti to the work of John Cage and she met and began working with dancers that became influential in the field of Postmodern dance, including Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton. Forti's first development of her Dance Constructions series was publicly presented at New York City's Reuben Gallery in December 1960, in an exhibition shared with Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg, titled Happenings at the Reuben Gallery. During this exhibition, Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer performed See Saw, and Forti and Patty Mucha (then Patty Oldenburg, Claes Oldenburg's then-spouse) performed Roller Boxes (then titled Rollers) with the contributions of audience members. In Thinking With the Body (2014, University of Chicago Press and Hirmer), curator Sabine Breitwieser wrote about Forti's Dance Constructions, "One could look at the Dance Constructions as problematizing everyday or, as you call them, pedestrian movements. If you take something out of an everyday context and isolate it, then it becomes something else. Using a rope to scale a steep ramp in Slant Board, for instance, evokes a typical climbing movement, but you've turned it to an isolated action that lacks a purpose, that exists just for itself." In May 1961, Forti presented a full evening of pieces she called Five Dance Constructions & Some Other Things at Yoko Ono's studio. Performers that night included Forti, Ruth Allphon, Marni Mahaffay, Robert Morris, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and Carl Lehmann-Haupt. These pieces proved to be influential in both the fields of dance and visual arts, and have been performed around the world since their development. Dance critic Jennifer Dunning wrote in her October 1991 New York Times review, "Simone Forti presented her first dance program in 1960 and since then has had a steadily increasing influence on post-modernist choreographers interested in exploring 'natural', or nonformalist, movement and dance." Stuart Comer, the Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at MOMA, New York, has said that the exhibitions of