Before the Look of Law Performance Double Bill: “What is to be Done?” by Ethan Philbrick and “Formerly Incarcerated Huddle (After Simone Forti)” by Alberto Lule

Performance Art Double Bill | Before the Look of Law Event

This event is co-sponsored by UCI Illuminations

Thursday, November 5, 2026 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm in  the University Art Gallery

Please register for this event here: Before the Look of Law Performance Double Bill: “What is to be Done?” by Ethan Philbrick and “Formerly Incarcerated Huddle (After Simone Forti)” by Alberto Lule

“What is to be Done?”
Ethan Philbrick with Mikaela Elson, MalIk Galnes, and Kathrn Shuman

“Formerly Incarcerated Huddle (After Simone Forti)”
Alberto Lule with Ruben Alarcon, Sam Brown, Elijah Guerra, Anthony McDuffie, and Alejandro Maldonado

This double bill brings together a performance by Alberto Lule, one of the artists in the Before the Look of Law exhibition, and an experimental choral work by Ethan Philbrick.

What Is to Be Done? is a new choral performance composed by New York-based Ethan Philbrick. Using short excerpts from Vladimir Lenin's 1902 political pamphlet as its source material, this is the third installment of a series of experimental choral pieces by Philbrick meditating on contested histories of utopian anti-capitalist critique, following “Choral Marx” (2018), based on Marx and Engels’s Manifesto for the Communist Party, and The Conquest of Bread (2025), based on the 1892 treatise by Peter Kropotkin. This piece is performed by a vocal ensemble of three singers, Mikaela Elson, Malik Gaines, and Kathryn Shuman, accompanied by Philbrick on the cello, with the participation of a volunteer choir. A broadside produced for this performance will be available.

Formerly Incarcerated Huddle (After Simone Forti) is a work in three acts by Alberto Lule, for 6 performers (Ruben Alarcon, Sam Brown, Elijah Guerra, Anthony McDuffie, Alejandro Maldonado and Lule himself) whose lives have been decisively impacted by incarceration. In a combination of movement, and monologue, they present an extended meditation on personal and collective experience of law and order, reenacting the procedure of an arrest in the first act, which transitions to a second act based on Simone Forti’s “Huddle,” where a group of participants link limbs to form a tight group and take turns climbing across the top of the mass and descending to rejoin the cluster. The third act, a discussion with the audience, will in this presentation be done jointly as a conversation with Lule and Philbrick, who has published on Simone Forti and “Huddle.”

Ethan Philbrick is a cellist, artist, and writer. He is currently curator-in-residence at The Poetry Project and a member of the curatorial collective for Offerings in New York City. In 2023, Philbrick published Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence with Fordham University Press. He holds a PhD from New York University in Performance Studies.

Alberto Lule lives and works in Los Angeles. Drawing from his own experiences with incarceration, his practice examines mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex and its intersections with immigration, the unhoused, drug addiction, and mental health. Lule holds an MFA in Art from UCI and is a PhD candidate in the Performance Studies Program at UCLA.

CO SPONSORS:
UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts University Art Galleries (UAG)
Department of Art
UCI Critical Theory
UCI LIFTED Program
Alec Glasser Center for the Power of Music & Social Change