Project Space Residency

May 9 – 23: Social Guidance in the VSW Salon

Social Guidance Opening: May 9, 7-9pm

Sarah Friedland is a filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Her work has been presented in festivals and film spaces including New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and BAMcinématek, in art spaces such as Performa19 Biennial, La MaMa Galleria, and MoMA, and in dance spaces such as the American Dance Festival. Her work has been supported by organizations such as the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Film at Lincoln Center, The Jerome Foundation, and the Berlinale. She was most recently a Bronx Museum AIM Emerging Artist Fellow, Pina Bausch Fellow for Choreography, and NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellow. Sarah graduated from Brown University’s department of Modern Culture and Media and started her career assisting filmmakers including Steve McQueen and Kelly Reichardt. As a teaching artist working between age populations, Sarah teaches filmmaking workshops between older adults communities and universities.

Through hybrid, experimental, and movement-based filmmaking, multi-channel video installation, and site-specific live dance performance, I stage and script bodies and cameras in concert with one another to elucidate, distill, and revise the embodied patterns of social life and the body politic. Facilitating a research process integrating found movements, gestures, and postures from embodied memories, cinema and archival footage, and contemporary movement languages, I choreograph 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.

VSW Project Space Residencies are supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the New York State Legislature, Monroe County, and Joy of Giving Something.