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. - Sarah Friedland

Director of Photography Gabe C. Elder, Produced by Sarah Friedland and Gabe C. Elder, Retreat Facilitators Hayward Leach and Patric Madden, Dancers Maxi Hawkeye Canion, Janet Charleston, Kayla Farrish, Brighid Greene, Aaron Loux, and Kayvon Pourazar, Bodyworker Paula Macali, Office Workers on Retreat
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, Choreographed by Sarah Friedland
in collaboration with dancers, Maxi Hawkeye Canion, Janet Charleston, Kayla Farrish, Brighid Greene, Aaron Loux, and Kayvon Pourazar, Production Designer Stephanie Osin Cohen, Writer and Editor Sarah Friedland, Retreat Dialogue written in collaboration with Hayward Leach and Patric Madden, Sound Designer Assaf Gidron, Assistant Sound Designer Jacob Ludwig, Sound Recordist Cheryl Wang, Production Assistant Raymond Tan, a Physical Plant production