lyrics future is in doubt shadow innocence with lips symmetry cryptic twisted twisting

I remembered how I’d felt when I first encountered the work’s archive, but now I could also see its more hopeful proposition of dreaming as resistance. Having missed the show, I pieced it together from the commissioned texts and a few small images, and only later watched the film, when a friend gave me a bootleg copy on a USB alongside two works by Terre Thaemlitz. Recently out as trans, and isolated because of the pandemic, I became obsessed with the film at the center of the exhibition-a fraught dream sequence as experienced by the eponymous prince (taken from Heinrich von Kleist’ s play) interspersed with interviews with contemporary trans scholars, activists, and artists-and how Staff’s disoriented, exhausted prince, sleepwalking his way to political martyrdom, could make sense of my own fear and exhaustion as reasonable responses to structural oppression. 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.

Lyrics future is in doubt shadow innocence with lips symmetry cryptic twisted twisting