During high school, while Alison Friedman ’02 was taking tap lessons, her brother was on the basketball court, practicing shots and jumps to make the crowd go wild. “You should get your brother to go to some of your dance classes,” his coach would often tell Friedman. “Get him to jump higher.”
While opposites on paper—“the athlete” and “the artist”—Friedman and her brother were both performers with a common language of physicality.
After Brown, Friedman went on to build a career finding common languages, developing projects that bridge people, cultures, and artistic practices. Ping Pong Productions, a cultural exchange organization Friedman founded in 2010, works to foster relationships between China and other nations through the performing arts.
Currently, Friedman works for Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she developed her latest award-winning project: the Artists are Athletes/Athletes are Artists series. In the short videos, the acts of performing and playing blend together. A tap dancer and soccer player show their intricate footwork in one episode; a basketball player and a dancer improvise their movements in another.
“We were able to show that the rigor, the discipline, the teamwork, facing challenges and pushing yourself to excel expectations, all of those things are true for both the best of the best artists and the best of the best athletes,” Friedman explains. “And I think those values are really important at a university, too, because those are things you want to teach students, no matter what they major in.”
But while the videos seem tailor-made to the UNC identity, Friedman says that the idea for them came years before she ended up at the university. There she finally found fertile ground for her artistic desire to explore the common physicality of art and sports. “There’s always a dash of luck and magic when you’re putting a creative project together,” Friedman says.
For the series, Friedman was inspired by her relationship with her brother, but also by the mutual language between artists and athletes. It’s so common, she explained, to describe how players “danced” on the field, put on a “great show,” or “worked the crowd.” Friedman wanted to take a step further and visually explore the shared culture revealed through our language.
Each video takes months to be completed. Friedman is involved in all stages of the process, working with partners, collaborators, and coaches at UNC to identify athletes who have particular grace, power, or creativity when playing and can help translate her vision for the video. “It’s funny, I’m talking about an athlete, but you could say that about an artist,” she says. While shooting usually happens in a single day, the editing takes much longer. The music featured in the videos is also composed for the project.
“I just knew I had to make this project and I ended up lucking out with such incredible creative partners, from the athletics teams to the artists to the video team,” she said. “It allowed us to make something really powerful, and that was the point.”
The first episode of the series premiered early this year during the halftime show of a UNC men’s basketball game against Notre Dame University—a crowd of over 20,000 people. Back in his home, Friedman’s brother grinned at his phone, retweeting the video and liking every post about it on social media.
