Social Sculpture: Huddling, Then and Now 

This movement-based workshop invites participants into an embodied exploration of connection through performance. We will begin with guided warm-ups and short choreographic exercises to create living sculptures that personify the conditions under which we live. 

Together, we will read and discuss Ethan Philbrick’s reflection on Simone Forti’s Huddle (1968), a text from which this workshop takes its title, considering how the body operates as both material and social form. The session will culminate in a collective performance of Forti’s Huddle, allowing participants to embody the learnings and imparted in the text. 

Through movement, reading, and collaboration, the workshop proposes the body not only as material for performance, but an active site of relationality, politics and possibility. 

No prior movement or dance experience is required. Participants are expected to read Ethan Philbrick’s reflection on Simone Forti’s Huddle, in preparation for the session. 

Registration is required. Please confirm your attendance through the email you received after signing up. If your plans change and you’re unable to attend, kindly notify us. Space is limited.

Organized by NYU CSGS’s Intersectional Feminist/Queer Studies Collective and co-sponsored by NYU's Center for Ballet and the Arts.

CASSILS (Canada/ USA) is a Guggenheim award winning visual and performance artist who makes their transgender body the material and protagonist of their performances. They work across the mediums of performance, sculpture, photography, film, sound and collaborative mediagenic spectacles. They are a recipient of the National Performance Network Award, a Villa Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a United States Artist Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award and many more.

Cassils’s solo exhibitions include: SITE Santa Fe, NM; the Banff Center for Art and Creativity; Victoria Albert Museum and Barbican, UK;  Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts, AU;  Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC and MU Eindhoven, Netherlands. Their performances and art works have been presented internationally at London’s National Theater and Southbank Center, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MUCEM, Marseille, France; Deutsches Historisches Museum and the Schwules Museum, Berlin, Germany; MUCA Roma, Mexico City, Mexico and The Broad, LA and more. Their films have screened at Sundance International Film Festival, and he is US representative for Artist Films’ International 2025.