Trust Exercises
25 minutes, digital video, 2022
World Premiere at New York Film Festival, Currents, October 2022.
Distributed by Video Data Bank
The final film in Friedland’s “Movement Exercises” trilogy, Trust Exercises is a hybrid experimental dance film which explores the tension between the poetics of group movement and its instrumentalization for capitalist management. Amending the choreography of team-building and the visual grammars of corporate video, Trust Exercises braids together movement from three work spaces: a fictional start-up retreat, a body work session as interview, and a dance rehearsal. Movements transmit between performers across scenes, complicating the discrete goals of their choreographies and examining their portability across spheres. Dislocating the movement of the retreat to the space of rehearsal, professional dancers transform stock exercises into intimate social dances. A body work session reconfigures the office environment. Lingering after hours, movement facilitators transmute team-building games into a playful duet. Trust Exercises examines the premise and promise of the exercise: that by moving together, repeatedly, we both create and recreate the social body.
Directed and Edited by Sarah Friedland. Produced by Sarah Friedland and Gabe C. Elder. Cinematography by Gabe C Elder. Production Design by Stephanie Osin Cohen. Performed by Hayward Leach and Patric Madden. Danced by Maxi Hawkeye Canion, Janet Charleston, Kayla Farrish, Brighid Greene, Aaron Loux, Kayvon Pourazar. Body Work by Paula Macali. Additional performances by Steve Atti, Ira Camhi, Randi Camhi, Gladys Gaines, Edgar Che Garcia, Christopher Gilbert II, Marcus Giovanni, Mehr Icarus, Janet Miserandino, Joseph David Surico, and Johnny Zito. Choreography by Sarah Friedland in collaboration with Maxi Hawkeye Canion, Janet Charleston, Kayla Farrish, Brighid Greene, Aaron Loux, and Kayvon Pourazar. Screenplay by Sarah Friedland. Start-Up Retreat Dialogue written in collaboration with Hayward Leach & Patric Madden. Sound Design by Assaf Gidron. Assistant Sound Design by Jacob Ludwig. Sound Recording by Cheryl Wang. Production Assistance by Raymond Tan. DI Facility Nice Dissolve. Colorist Joseph Mastantuono. DI Producer Pierce Varous. A Physical Plant Production.
Funded by the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, and an emergency grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.