Group Works

Ethan Philbrick is an interdisciplinary artist, cellist, and writer. He has taught at Pratt Institute, Muhlenberg College, and New York University. Recent performance projects include Choral Marx, 10 Meditations in an Emergency, The Gay Divorcees, Mutual Aid among Animals, and Slow Dances.

Introduction 1 1. Huddle 25 2. Commune 51 3. Groupuscule 84 4. Ensemble 113 Afterword 141 Acknowledgments 145 Notes 147 Index 169

. . . Group Works offers not only a rich and fascinating academic exploration of artistic small-group formations past and present but also a tentative scaffolding to experiment with our forms of reading and study. By asking how we come into and out of groups, how they coalesce and disassemble, the book invites readers to join in and elaborate its collective impulse.-- "e-flux" . . . Philbrick's book manages to preserve both the powerful fantasy of assembly alongside its more noxious aspects. Assembly can be hopeful; it can unleash new forms of power; it can create a new sense of being. But it can also exclude, block, deny, rule, silence, corrupt, and destroy. By finding moments of unconventional grouping. . . Philbrick takes the failure to cohere as a marker for the dissonant ensembles that our moment requires and that we can find in odd groupings of dancers, dreamers, slackers, and reluctant revolutionaries.---Jack Halberstam, Bomb Magazine With Group Works, Ethan Philbrick has created a rare text with which to think and act. Although there have been studies of the crowd, the mass, and the collective, as well as critical accounts of community and participation in the art world, Philbrick presents a novel theory of small groups and their political potential. Much like how Simone Forti's dance construction Huddle disperses to allow the formation of new huddles, Philbrick invites readers into the work and then releases them into the world, freshly prepared to live differently together. ---Danielle Goldman, Associate Professor of Critical Dance Studies at The New School and author of I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom Ethan Philbrick has written an erudite and compassionate book about how and why we fall into and out of groups. Taking some classic group forms from the late twentieth-century--performances ranging from dance, music, psychoanalysis, literature, and collective living--he sifts them carefully for their uses in surviving our own violently disjointed moment.---Tavia Nyong'o, author of Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life