Staff’s work via a pamphlet by Isabel Waidner, produced for their show “The Prince of Homburg” at Dundee Contemporary Arts in 2019. Along the way, Philbrick introduces a chorus of thinkers-theorists of community, theorists of in-operative community, theorists. Taken together, each pairing amplifies and extends the book’s central impulses to consider how groups assemble and disassemble. Each chapter pairs a “group work”-Simone Forti’s 1961 performance Huddle, Samuel Delany’s 1979 memoir Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love, Lizzie Borden’s 1976 film Regrouping, and Julius Eastman’s 1979 musical piece Gay Guerrilla-with contemporary works that re-imagine, re-perform, or dialogue with these experiments. Moving with these questions, the book turns to artists experimenting with novel group formations in dance, literature, film, and music in the 1960s and ’70s. How do we group, and how does that matter? What kind of good-bad thing is a group to do? He enters the text with a tentativeness toward groups, recognizing the ways that they are frequently viewed with healthy suspicion or uncritical celebration. Following a “desire for collectivity,” Philbrick takes the small-scale formation of “the group” as the locus of inquiry. At first glance, it’s a book of academic theory coming out of performance studies. There are many ways to move through and think alongside Ethan Philbrick’s Group Works.
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