An intimate performance film featuring the Amy Brodo Trio and dancer Lily Christensen, exploring the dialogue between Baroque music and contemporary movement inside Alonzo King LINES Ballet studios in San Francisco.
I've always been drawn to great modern dance, both here in the San Francisco Bay Area and during my years studying conducting in Vienna, where I was able to experience a rich and vibrant contemporary dance scene. So when Amy Brodo asked me to film her Baroque trio performing with dancer Lily Christensen, I was immediately excited by the idea of bringing those two worlds together.
There is just so much opportunity to capture the physical conversation between them—the precision and subtlety of musicians playing centuries-old music alongside the freedom and expressiveness of contemporary movement.
I’ve spent much of my life around musicians, and I’m always interested in what you can see when you watch them closely. Concentration shows up in a breath, a glance, the way someone prepares an entrance, or the almost imperceptible movement of a hand before a note speaks.
Those details can be easy to miss in a concert hall. The camera lets us get close enough to notice them.
Lily’s movement adds another layer. Her choreography responds to the music without simply following it, sometimes moving with the musicians and sometimes pulling away from them.
Watching the two together, the distinction between musical gesture and physical gesture starts to feel less obvious. Both depend on timing, weight, tension, release, and years of training that eventually become instinctive.
While filming, I kept returning to the musicians’ hands.
A tiny shift in pressure or position can completely change the character of a sound. Years of repetition become embedded in movements that happen almost without thought, and those same years literally start to reshape the fingers. The hands that give shape to the music are literally in turn reshaped by the music making process.
Portraits of my father's hands, photographed late in his life while holding instruments he built and played over many decades.
I think my fascination with hands began with my father. He was a master Persian musician and also built many of the instruments he played. Growing up, I watched his hands make music, shape wood, adjust an instrument, and do things that seemed impossibly precise.
Near the end of his life, I photographed his hands with several of those instruments. By then they carried the physical history of decades spent making and playing music.
I still think about those photographs when I film musicians. In Amy’s hand on the fingerboard, or in the movement of a bow, I see some of the same thing I saw in my father: knowledge that has become physical. Lily expresses it with her whole body. The musicians express it through movements small enough to fit between two fingers.
That sensitivity to gesture follows me into other kinds of filmmaking too. People reveal a great deal through the way they move, listen, work, and interact—often before they say anything at all.
Performance Portfolio
Although this page features a single performance collaboration, I've spent much of my life in the performing arts—as a filmmaker, musician, conductor, and educator. If you'd like to explore additional concert films, music videos, and interdisciplinary performance collaborations, you'll find them in the Performance Portfolio.
Whether documenting an organization's mission, an artist, or a performance, every meaningful project begins with listening.
I'd love to hear what you're creating.