Book Launch and Screening for "One Thing Follows Another"

Choreographers Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti first rocked the New York art world in the ’60s––and their impact continues to be felt across media, art forms, and generations. The book launch and screening on May 7 celebrates these two seminal artists with readings from the new essay collection One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer by Valerie Witte and Sarah Rosenthal. The readings will be followed by a panel discussion and Q&A with the authors and dance luminaries Ishmael Houston-Jones, Patricia Hoffbauer, and Wendy Perron. Books will be available for purchase.

Sarah Rosenthal is the author of the full-length collections Estelle Meaning Star (Chax, 2024), Lizard (Chax, 2016), Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), and two books in collaboration with Valerie Witte: One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life Through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer (Punctum, 2025) and The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (The Operating System, 2019). She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010). Her collaborative film We Agree on the Sun has received numerous accolades including Best Experimental Short, Berlin Independent Film Festival. A new collaborative film, Lizard Song, has screened at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival, the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, and Espaço Cultural das Mercês in Lisbon. She has received the Leo Litwak Fiction Award, a Creative Capacity Innovation Grant, a San Francisco Education Fund Grant, and residencies at This Will Take Time, Hambidge, New York Mills, Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, and Ragdale, as well as a two-year term as Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts. From 2012 to 2023, she served as a juror for the California Book Awards.

Valerie Witte is the author of multiple poetry and hybrid books, including A Rupture in the Interiors (Airlie Press, 2023), a finalist for the Oregon Book Award 2025 Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. With Sarah Rosenthal, she is co-author of a two-book project exploring the work of postmodern dancer-choreographers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer: The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (Operating System, 2019) and One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer (Punctum, 2025). Her previous collaborations include projects with visual 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. She was a founding member of the Bay Area Correspondence School and previously served as a member of Kelsey Street Press and Airlie Press. She currently edits education books in Portland, Oregon, where she lives with her husband, Andrew.

Brazilian-born/NYC dance artist Patricia Hoffbauer has been creating dance and performance work for a long time and in collaboration with many artists. Work highlights: “Para-Dice,” which has been presented twice by Danspace Project; “Dances for Intimate Spaces and Friendly People,” which she created with 16 performers as a Gibney Dance Center DIP artist; and “Getting Away with Murder,” about Ana Mendieta, which was presented at La Mama. Hoffbauer has written for Movement Research Performance Journal and Performance Arts Journal (PAJ). Her essay “Who Killed Carmen?” was included in Ella Shohat’s anthology Talking Visions published by the New Museum. Writings on Dance, the Australian performance magazine, published her piece “Para-Dice Journeys.” She is a contributing writer to The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory published by Wesleyan University Press. Hoffbauer has taught at Wesleyan College, Sarah Lawrence College, Pratt Institute, Marymount Manhattan College, Yale University, Hunter College, and Princeton University. She was hired to develop NYU’s Tisch Collaborative Arts Department, where she is now an Associate Arts Professor. She has received commissions by The New School, Barnard College, and Tish Dance (twice) to create dance pieces with their students.

Ishmael Houston-Jones is a choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed worldwide. He has received three New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Awards for collaborations with writer Dennis Cooper, choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and Fred Holland, and composers Chris Cochrane and Nick Hallett, and a fourth "Bessie" for contributions to the field of dance. Houston-Jones curated Platform 2012: Parallels, which centered on choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism, and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now. As an author, Houston-Jones' essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been published in several anthologies. His first book, FAT and Other Stories was published by Yonkers International Press in June 2018. Houston-Jones is a 2022 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2024, he was awarded the Balasaraswati/Joy Ann Dewey Beinecke Endowed Chair for Distinguished Teaching award from the American Dance Festival. His work has been supported by The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Herb Alpert Foundation, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Wendy Perron is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, writer, and editor. As a dancer she has performed with dozens of choreographers and is a former member of the Trisha Brown Company. As a choreographer and company director, she created more than 40 works, performed at Lincoln Center Festival, Jacob’s Pillow, Danspace Project, the Joyce, and elsewhere. From 1978 to 1984 she taught full-time at Bennington College; she has also taught at SUNY Purchase, Princeton, Rutgers, the Five College Dance Department, and NYU Tisch Dance. She currently teaches dance history at The Juilliard School. Perron’s dance writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Ballet Review, and Dance Magazine, among others. She is the author of Through the Eyes of a Dancer and The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970–1965, both published by Wesleyan University Press. She initiated the Bennington College Judson Project to document this historical period; much of the project is preserved at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and served as seed information for MoMA’s 2018 exhibit on Judson Dance Theater. Her recent projects include the “Unsung Heroes of Dance History” series and “Historical Essays,” both on her website.

Image: Book cover of One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. Cover art by Jennifer Mack-Watkins. Courtesy of Sarah Rosenthal and Valerie Witte.