One Thing Follows Another: Sarah Rosenthal & Valerie Witte

Since the 1960s, the work of dancer-choreographers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer have made a profound impact on the art world, and the reverberations continue to this day.

Join us at Flow Chart Space to celebrate the incredible legacy of these two luminaries with the publication of Valerie Witte and Sarah Rosenthal’s essay collection One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. The evening will feature multimedia performances based on the book, which creatively explores Forti and Rainer’s work alongside the authors’ own experiences of dance. The readings will be followed by a discussion with the authors, facilitated by The Flow Chart Foundation’s Interim Executive Director Eric Longo, and a book signing.

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About One Thing Follows Another:

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.

Sarah Rosenthal is the author of Estelle Meaning Star (Chax, 2024), Lizard (Chax, 2016), Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), and two books 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 (Operating System, 2019). She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area (Dalkey, 2010). Her collaborative film We Agree on the Sun has received Best Experimental Short, Berlin Independent Film Festival. A new film, Lizard Song, is on the film festival circuit. sarahrosenthal.net

Valerie Witte is the author of multiple poetry and hybrid books, including A Rupture in the Interiors (Airlie, 2023, finalist for the 2025 Oregon Book Award); and One Thing Follows Another (punctum, 2025) and The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (Operating System, 2019), both in collaboration with Sarah Rosenthal. Her work has also appeared in publications such as VOLT, Diagram, Interim, and The Hunger. She has participated in residencies through The Hambidge Center, Ragdale Foundation, and La Porte Peinte Center for the Arts. She previously served as a member of Kelsey Street and Airlie Press. valeriewitte.com