In this episode, filmmaker and dancer Sarah Friedland shares how dance choreography correlates with film directing, the status of people’s ideologies through body gesture and movement, and working with professional and non-professional performers. Finally in today's concluding thought, Edward talks about lines.
Guest Bio:
Sarah Friedland (she/her) is a filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Through hybrid, narrative, and experimental filmmaking, multi-channel video installation, and site-specific live dance performance, she stages and scripts bodies and cameras in concert with one another to elucidate and distill the undetected, embodied patterns of social life and the body politic. Facilitating a research process integrating found movements, gestures, and postures from cinema and archival footage, embodied memories, and contemporary dance languages, she choreographs through practices of interviewing, pre- and re-enactment, adaptation, and improvisational play, shaping dances with diverse communities of performers and movers—from professional dancers to cohorts of seniors and teenagers.
Her work has screened and been presented in numerous festivals and film spaces including New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, Ann Arbor Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, BAMcinématek, Mubi, and Anthology Film Archives, in art spaces such as Performa19 Biennial, La MaMa Galleria, MoMA, Sharjah Art Foundation, MAM Rio, Nasher Museum, Wassaic Project, and Manifattura delle Arti (Bologna), and in dance spaces including the American Dance Festival and Dixon Place, among others. Her work has been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Film at Lincoln Center, Dance Films Association, Art Factory International, NYSCA/Wave Farm, Rhode Island State Council of the Arts/NEA, Berlinale Talents, where she was one of 10 selected screenwriter/directors for the 2017 Script Station/Project Lab, and most recently by the Bronx Museum, where she was an AIM Emerging Artist Fellow in 2020.
Time Codes:
1:10 - Sarah's Film and Dance Upbringings
14:00 - Political Discourse and Imagery of Groups in Crowds
31:40 - Experimenting the Home Workout Video and Embodied Interviews in Home Exercises
46:18 - Choreography as an Intervention, Tackling School Shootings and Youth Futures in Drills
55:10 - Critiques on Institutional Form and Corporate Management in Trust Exercises
1:06:20 - Concluding Thought: Lines
Show Notes:
Crowds Excerpt and Trailer, Home Exercises Excerpt, Drills Trailer, and Trust Exercises Excerpt