NYAB Event - Dara Friedman "Dancer"

Dara Friedman "Dancer"

Gavin Brown's Enterprise

This event has ended.

To think with the body, to dance.

Dancer, 2011. Is a new film by Dara Friedman. It is in black and white and 16mm. It is a film about movement.

Inspired partly by the late Pina Bausch (1940-1990) creator of the dance theater movement Tanztheater, Friedman - like Bausch is not necessarily interested in how people moved, but rather, what moves them. To this end, the film observes the dancers' internal monologues, made manifest through self-scripted movement.

People dance in the streets of Miami. Outdoors under the sun and moon. The camera moves along with them. Tethered, it orbits each dancer, like another half. Dancer uses street corners as a stage, street lamps as spotlights and storefronts as backdrops. We see ourselves and how we move. The reason to move is what is filmed here. Not on stage but on a patch of street. A patch of stage shared with the flaneur, the tourist and the worker on lunch break.

Friedman records the body thinking. Its blood pumping, its breath syncopating and its molecules vibrating. In a world where every thing moves, Friedman and her camera embrace those things that are filled with will and agency. Those things that think with steps and choreography.

Dancer is the most recent film in a series of new works by Friedman that focus on performance and public space. In 2007, the Public Art Fund commissioned Musical, 2007-2008, which captured spontaneous actions orchestrated across Manhattan. Similar to Dancer, Musical plays upon the vitality of city life where unexpected encounters can be a daily occurrence.

In 2009, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt commissioned Friedman to create a performance as part of the exhibition "Playing The City". Frankfurt Song, 2010, asked the city's array of street musicians to interpret the Rolling Stone's 1969 song "You Can't Always Get What You Want". The performance and subsequent film takes a snapshot of the city and makes a point of highlighting the endless renaissance of its people, places and politics.