** Note this event takes place off site at La MaMa’s space at 47 Great Jones St, New York, NY.**

We’re delighted to be co-presenting a special conversation hosted by La MaMa Galleria,between Sarah Friedland and Tess Takahashi on the choreographies, documentation, and politics of crowds seen in Friedland’s 3-channel video installation CROWDS.  This event is presented in tandem with our upcoming workshop: On the Choreographic: Dance and Movement in Hybrid Film Practices led by Sarah Friedland to reflect on the relationship between moving images and moving bodies.

This event will focus on Friedland’s three-channel video installation of a durational dance, CROWDS investigates the choreography of crowd typologies and the slippages between them. This piece articulates the choreographic register embedded in our political discourses and polemics,  finding what is amassed and what is lost as we gather and disperse.

A 3-channel video installation of a durational dance, CROWDS investigates the choreography of crowd typologies and the slippages between them. Much like a flock of murmurating birds, the thresholds between these crowd types are blurred and distorted: the rocking of bodies in prayer slip into the shaking of raving dancers, the training exercises of sports teams slide into the structured formations of fascist spectacles. Focusing on these collective formations, movements, and gestures, CROWDS uses dance to interrogate the distinctions we make and to destabilize the relationship between ideologies and moving bodies. It attempts to articulate the embedded choreographic register of our political discourses and polemics, reflecting what is amassed and what is lost as we gather and disperse.

Sarah Friedland is a filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Her work has screened and been presented in numerous festivals and film spaces including New Directors/New Films, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and BAMcinématek, in art spaces such as MoMA, Sharjah Art Foundation, MAM Rio, and the Wassaic Project, and in dance spaces including the American Dance Festival and Dixon Place. Her work has been supported by Film at Lincoln Center, Berlinale Talents, Dance Films Association, and the New York State Council of the Arts, among others.

Tess Takahashi is a Toronto-based scholar, writer, and programmer who focuses on experimental moving image arts. She is currently working on two book projects, Impure Film: Medium Specificity and the North American Avant-Garde (1968-2008), which examines artists’ work with historically new media, and Encounters with Digital Magnitude, which considers artists’ work against the backdrop of Big Data and data visualization. Takahashi has been scholar-in-residence at the Film-Makers’ Co-op in New York City (2015), at Canyon Cinema in San Francisco (2016-17), and the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Center in Toronto (2017-18). She is a member of the experimental media programming collective Ad Hoc and the editorial collective for Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media. Takahashi’s writing has been published there as well as in Cinema Journal, the Millennium Film Journal, Animation, MIRAGE, and Cinema Scope.