Sarah Friedland
Sarah Friedland is a filmmaker and choreographer. Through films and video installations, she combines non-traditional forms of filmmaking and choreography by looking at the social choreographies and found movements that make up our social world. She also incorporates dance practices to try to break down said choreographies and revise them to think about the political possibilities of choreography.
In the following interview, Sarah and I discussed CROWDS, a 3-channel video installation of a durational dance investigating the choreography of crowd typologies and the slippages between them, and her trilogy Movement Exercises that deconstructs and revises the choreographic vocabularies of exercises practiced across home, work, and school spaces. This interview was conducted via ZOOM on April 29, 2024 by Lindsay Caschak.
For more information on Sarah and/or to view excerpts of her work, please visit:
Lindsay (L): What was your journey (both emotional and logistical) from being a dancer to becoming a filmmaker? Were there any inspirations that drew you from one end to the other?
Sarah (S): As much as I was trained in modern dance and in certain lineages of dance styles, the choreography that I work on filmically is not from a dance lineage, [but] looking really at what I would consider found movements, movements that I find or my collaborators find in the social world that they are a part of. As an undergraduate, I wanted to study both film and dance, and I felt like they were on a collision course for me very quickly. I was still making live dances for [the] stage at the time, which I haven't done in many years. The dances I was making were largely about how we embody moving images, and the films I was making were about moving bodies. And so pretty quickly, my entry point into filmmaking was making experimental dance films . [I] did that as an undergraduate, and then that kind of continued into the work I do now. Although I should say my professional entry point is that my first few years out of school, I basically did every entry level job you can do on a film set or in a production office. I worked with a lot of great filmmakers. I worked in TV. I worked in film. I basically did every job I could to learn the nuts and bolts of how films actually get made. That was my entrance into the industry, if you will. I stopped working for other filmmakers after about three and a half, four years, give or take, of full time work for other filmmakers.
L: That's such an awesome journey. I feel like when a lot of college students leave college to start an entry level position, they try to stay there for as long as they can in order to gain experience, but, in a way, also lose inspiration to move forward with their own ideas and work. I was also a dancer, and so that's why I was very drawn to your work. Being in my last year at UCSC, I’m also having a hard time distinguishing whether I should pursue dance or film, and I think it’s very inspiring that you are merging the two art forms.
In the film industry, we tend to view non mainstream media as abstract and experimental film. Would you identify yourself as an experimental filmmaker?
S: I would identify as an experimental filmmaker. I feel like the landscape of media production and filmmaking in the United States has become so commercialized and market driven that pretty much anyone who's not making Marvel movies is considered an experimental filmmaker, even if they're making more traditional narrative films. I don't feel like [experimental] is a dirty word. I definitely consider myself an experimental filmmaker. I'm drawing inspiration from the lineage of experimental dance filmmakers, in particular, this moment where the Judson Church choreographers, like Yvonne Rayner, Trisha Brown, etc. were working with more pedestrian, less virtuosic movement and there was the emergence of more American experimental film lineages. There's a cinematographer named Babette Mangolte who worked with both Chantal Akerman, while she was in New York, and with the Judson Church choreographers, that gave way to a lot of experimental movement-based films. That's a lineage that I feel very grateful for in terms of what they've created, how it's inspired me, and being able to make work that, in some ways, is in dialogue with that generation. I feel like their work circulates within the film marketplace as experimental film, and I would use the same language for my work. I just finished my first narrative feature film, where I'm trying to translate the movement-based idiom that I've been working in into something that has more of a story and is a bit more character based, but still very attuned to gesture and movement. These terms, I think, also have a lot to do with how you are trying to move within the film marketplace. For that film, we hope to sell it to a distributor and have it in theaters. So I can't use the word experimental, even if that is where I'm coming from, because that would be preventative of being able to sell it.
L: I'm excited to see that narrative feature, and watching that play out!
I’d like to talk more about your trilogy piece called Movement Exercises. Home Exercises is the first film of that trilogy, which explores the gestural habits and choreographies of aging individuals in their homes. As someone who is constantly exposed to anti-aging fear in the media, the romanticization of an elderly person’s routine was refreshing. Being that the film was a beautifully choreographed piece, was it difficult to communicate your vision to your cast members?
S: At the time of making that film, I was working as a caregiver for New York City artists with dementia, and one of the things that I was really drawn to was the beauty of their movements that were adaptations to disability. One of the clients I had, she used a walker, in order to move through space. But in her home, she had memorized exactly how far she had to be from a couch, to a cabinet, to a lamp, etc. so that she wouldn't have to use her walker in a certain part of the space. The choreography is so detailed and there was such beauty in it to me. I realized that seeing beauty in the movement of older adults could be an anti-ageist choreography. That was a part of how I interacted with our potential cast members in saying, “I really want to show the the beauty of your daily movement, and that doesn't mean that we can't depict moments of pain or frustration, or of disability, but to use a choreographic process, to present them as dance, is a way of finding the anti-ageist aesthetic of treating their movement as dance.
L: In the film, we get to see an insight into elderly people’s distinct lives, physical routines, and everyday activities. What was the casting process like? How did you pick these individuals and what was your approach on filming these individuals?
S: I was collaborating with a woman named Rachel Balaban, who's a long time friend and collaborator of mine, who teaches dance to a huge community of students between Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut for the aging population and those with Parkinson's. She put out an open call to her students, [making the casting process] somewhat self-selecting in that the people who were interested wanted to be imaged on camera.
I love working with nonprofessional performers who really want to be a part of this process and want to be imaged.That’s how I go about the ethics of [filmmaking]. It's not trying to ever persuade somebody into this [process]. It's finding the people who are excited by that. I think that's a big [part of] the ethics [surrounding] the work that I do. I think a lot of the discourse around ethics in nonfiction filmmaking is sometimes described in negative terms, as if we don't want to be extractive. We want to avoid non consensual filming. For me, it's really important to achieve the same, ethical ends, but to do so in a place of collective desire.
Once we found those people, I would ask each performer to tell me about their daily movements. When did they experience pleasure? When did they experience pain? What forms of repetition did they notice? When were they most aware of their body? Instead of having them just describe it to me, I would invite them to actually show me, and then I would mirror it back physically, and this would turn it into a duet. Through that process, I would suggest alterations that we could make to make more visible the kind of choreographic patterns of it. In some cases, we found something that was just very, very faithful to their movement and was almost a reenactment. And in other cases, I would respond to the performer and their own hesitations, questions, or fears. So for example, the woman with the sponge at the end, she had so clearly just taken in a lot of ageist ideas, and she was convinced that her body and her movement wasn't beautiful. And so for her, the process was asking her, “okay, what movement do you think is beautiful?” And she felt that waltzing and balletic movement was beautiful.
So then for me, as the choreographer, the task was: How do we transform this movement we've decided on, which is your routine of sponging? What choreographic manipulations need to happen to turn that into something that you can see as a beautiful movie?
For each performer, it was a completely different kind of process of exchange where I'm both suggesting choreographic revisions that I know will make it work for camera, and at the same time, making those revisions respond to the performers and what they will recognize themselves in as dancers, because that was really important for them—to feel like they were dancers, even though they were dealing with their ordinary movement.
L: I think it's a beautiful thing that you really work with your subjects. I feel as though I’m only exposed to filmmakers and directors who rarely work with their subjects and/or want to transcribe solely their own artistic viewpoint. But, a filmmaker should be talking with their actors, and they should be collaborating in a way that helps everyone.
S: Part of the way [as to why] I work like that is because I never studied or trained in documentary filmmaking. As much as my work is sometimes screened as nonfiction film and in nonfiction film festivals or venues, my background in making films draws upon being a dancer and being in the [dance] studio. So for me, I like it to feel like a dance studio where we're [working together]. What if we do this slower? What if we repeat this? And so, I think I never related to the people in my films as documentary subjects that I'm going to record. I always thought of them as dancers.
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L: The second film in your trilogy Drills is an experimental dance film revolving around lockdown drills, boy scout drills, corporate meditation drills. As someone who grew up in the American public school system, and while I’m glad I did, I found myself anxiously relating to this film a lot. Has it changed your worldview considering these everyday movements, specifically surrounding heavier concepts such as school shootings and social standards, choreography? Do you aim for your work to have a similar impact for your viewers?
S: My hope is that people will have a self-reflexive experience watching them. For example, the active shooter drills, they're designed supposedly to keep us safe. We know that those choreographies completely fail to keep us safe. So if they fail to do the thing that they are supposedly designed to do, what do they actually do? One thing that they actually do is that they anticipate a future where students aren't kept safe by the institutions that are supposed to keep them safe and a future of anxiety around mass death events. The choreography is anticipatory. And so we made small revisions. As much as the revisions that we made in the choreography of those drills that are in the film don't actually produce the future that I hope we will have, I hope that we can find other ways of moving together, and therefore find other ways of living together. For me, I find that my political imagination is really animated around movement.
A big part of the process of making Drills was working with, at the time, current high school students. They so clearly knew that these choreographies were completely ineffectual. We talked a lot about how they embodied that, how their bodies felt in a classroom, and how their bodies related to the pace of the class. A big part of the process that isn't fully on screen is asking them: how would you re-choreograph these drills and what would they be for?
L: You describe your film Trust Exercises, the final film in your trilogy, as a film that “...explores the tension between the poetics of group movement and its instrumentalization for capitalist management.” Do you intend for your work to highlight notions of the counter-modern American culture ie; individualistic approaches, consumerism, and/or capitalistic approaches to self-care?
S: For me, it's coming from a place of anti-capitalist politics. I think it's not very didactic in doing so. But [with] the trilogy—with each one, there was something I was still chewing on that I made within the next. It wasn't originally planned as a trilogy, which you can see in the structure. It doesn't quite work as a triptych. It's more like, there's maybe some sequential threads in them.
With Trust Exercises, I felt this tension between the poetics and possibility of group movement. I love being in a space with other dancers and feeling something so liberatory in figuring out how to move together in different ways. It's like you know, as a dancer, when that group movement works and everyone is in it, consenting, and in sync. There's no feeling like it— [it’s] a beautiful thing. It feels the best. It feels so liberatory, and I trust and believe in that feeling.
And at the same time, seeing the ways in which movement, choreography, and therapeutic language is co-opted for corporate management makes me so angry. I feel like the use of these forms of embodiment to increase the accumulation of wealth by major corporations is just absolutely abhorrent to me. And so I was interested in the tension between that experience of moving together as a group and then that same thing being co-opted for capitalist management, and wanting to look at that friction between the form and its use.
We tried to figure out where we might be able to record an actual retreat and quickly realized that that was not going to be possible for this film. So that retreat [in the film] is staged. It's improvised, though. The opening monologue is something that I wrote, but then I gave the two facilitators, who are actors playing facilitators, exercises, catch phrases, and directions to use within the retreat, but then [I] asked them to actually facilitate it themselves.
We created a structure for it, and then they went with it. So that line when he says, “let's make sure Marcus doesn't feel like a failure,” that was one of the actors improvising, which is one of my favorite moments. That language of support and familial language—”we're all your family, we're here for you”— is such a ubiquitous part of corporate management now.
I'm interested in the ways in which uses of choreography can present a critique to these dominant modes. Whether it's aging or capitalism, [I’m interested in] using choreography as a counter critique.
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L: In your interview with NYU Florence revolving around Movement Exercises and CROWDS, it fascinated me that you incorporated your cameraman and grip’s movement as part of your overall choreography (ending in your dancers having a standing ovation for the grip). Was it your intention to incorporate this into your work or was it a post-production thought? Moving forward, would you use this sort of collaborative technique with future crew members to instill trust on set?
S: I always bring a choreographic mindset to how I work on set—which is not to say that the camera operators, the grips, the sound recordists are dancing. But, thinking about the modulation of distance between each of those individuals and the person or the space that is being filmed is very choreographic, because it’s your job as the director to regulate distances in time. For me, thinking about that as a choreography allows me to basically plan the shots and then plan the film. Designing where [the individuals] are in space is a choreographic task.
I work with mainly the same key crew—my cinematographer and production designer, and we're always talking about the pace at which [the cameraman’s] moving and the quality of that pace. Is it consistent? Does he accelerate? Does he decelerate? Does he get further away at a certain moment? What moment is that happening at? I'm always thinking of the film set as a kind of choreographic space where it's not just those who are on camera, but those who are behind the scenes. I guess, again, it’s me having a very liberal use of the word choreography, because this [is] choreography that's not going to be imaged. This is choreography that's really just me thinking about the spatial relationships of performers and non performers. To explicitly answer your question, I knew I had designed a specific timing of exactly how the camera was going to move. So I was thinking about the choreography of the camera, but, of course, cameras are operated by humans, and that made it necessary for a crew member to perform that choreography. So it was both designed beforehand, but [also], noticing the movement of the body of the crew member was a spontaneous experience on set of all of us being like, “Oh my god. He's amazing.” I think we don't often talk about the kind of physicality of crew members, and [how] that physicality is a part of their craft. The aesthetics of the shot is completely dependent upon the muscle memory of that crew member.
I find it really helpful to use the tools of dance to plan a film. Then, you can figure out what each crew member, what language they need to achieve what you're trying to achieve. If you can plan it in a choreographic way, I think it gives you clarity moving on to a set to figure out whose functions you need to enable or initiate. The choreographic kind of planning is what allows me to do that effective
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L: How would you compare your experience as a woman in the dance industry versus the film industry? Do you feel like you experience the same judgment and pressure from other people, or internally?
S: I think I probably can't make the comparison because my professional life post-college has really played out in the film world and a little bit in the art world. Even though I'm working with dance, with the exception of two smaller showcases that I participated in right after school, I really haven't done much in the dance [world]. I work with dancers, but the work doesn't circulate in the dance industry. It’s not being commissioned and funded by dance organizations. So I don't have a good grasp of [that comparison], even though I've been making choreography for a decade.
L: Do you have any advice for any fellow women and women-identifying filmmakers, who are hoping to incorporate choreography into their work, or any general advice for future feminist filmmakers?
S: I would definitely recommend going and working for other filmmakers on other productions, even if it's completely unrelated to the types of films you want to make. No matter how much you learn through a film education, you don't learn how a film set works and who everybody is and how they interact and all of those protocols. I would really recommend doing that work as a part of your education, also because they pay you to do it. But, also, know when to get out. People get so caught up in making sure you have the next job and who's going from which film to which film, which show to which show. There's this very clear ladder, and that you can start climbing it, and I found myself wanting to start climbing it. And then it's like, “I don't want to be the assistant unit production manager. I want to make my own films. I’m no longer learning how to be an artist here.” So, I would recommend getting that education, but leaving before it becomes your whole life, if you want to make your own work, and then finding another way to pay your bills. For me, that meant other day jobs. Because that’s the practical element on the creative side. I would just encourage you to keep experimenting. All of this work that came in, for so many years was weekend stuff that I did.
Find your peers. Find your production designer, find your cinematographer, find your dancers, and just keep experimenting. The hardest part is the first five to six years out of school: you no longer have the structure and the resources to just try and make something. You have to kind of find that for yourself. The best thing you can do is find peers who want to do it with you, who will be like, “Oh, let's make a dance movie on Sunday.”
I guess this isn't specific to dance and film, but just keep doing it, and you'll find your way and you'll find your people.