By Krista Spies spieskri@grinnell.edu

“¡Viva Maestro!” is a 2022 feature documentary film that brings the viewer to concert halls around the world as director, writer and producer Ted Braun showcases the electric conductor Gustavo Dudamel. Braun came to Grinnell College last Wednesday, April 12 to screen the movie and participate in a Q&A, sponsored by the Rosenfield Program, the film and media studies concentration and the music department.what

“I think first and foremost, his [Dudamel’s] story is an exemplary tale of the resilience of a person who believes, against incredible obstacles, that art can bring us together in the most trying of times and remind us of why we belong together and what we share in the most principal way as human beings,” said Braun.

Dudamel is currently the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Paris Opera and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, which is Dudamel’s home country.

One of the reasons why Chen, professor of studio art and chair of the American studies department, said he wanted the MIYUMI Project to close his exhibition is because of his personal interest in improvisation as an artist.

“We try to investigate the potential of something,” he said. “What does this object or space afford?”

Kioto Aoki, drummer and daughter of Tatsu Aoki, said that the band was responding to the room and the audience.

While she said she found the room to be humid — “Very ugly,” she added — which flattened the texture of the taiko’s soundwaves, rehearsal was dedicated to working with the drum to better its sound quality. She also found the audience had brought “good energy” with their engagement.

She referred to a “sixth sense” that the band members have been able to develop through experience in their craft and working together. They are “communicating through the sounds

The filmmaker described Dudamel as “the most dynamic and important conductor of his generation,” and as “someone who had a unique capacity to bring people from many different walks of life, sociologically.”

Braun said that this documentary was motivated in part by his desire to take a break from making films about big global problems. His two past feature documentaries include “Betting on Zero,” released in 2016 and about economic crime with the company Herbalife, and “Darfur Now,” released in 2007 and about genocide in Darfur, Sedan. Instead, in “¡Viva Maestro!,” Braun places his focus “on someone who was really interested in bringing beauty into the world.”

The Dudamel film is an example of the documentary filmmaking style known as “cinéma vérité,” or observational cinema. Braun described it as “following the unfolding events in a person’s life.” In this style, as the film’s team accompanies the main subject in their daily life, situations change and alter the filming process. “More often than not, what you expect to unfold turns out to be quite

The band was placed in front of “A Place for Our Bodies,” a piece that centers a silhouette of a person on a wall and is surrounded with various canes Chen collected.

Drummer Noriko Sugiyama joined in much later than the rest of the band. When she did join in, she eventually met Kioto Aoki, and they entered into a groove played in near unison, in which the other players stepped back. This sound could be felt throughout the room, and it reverberated to the back, where a brick hung from the ceiling went from stillness to bouncing.

Over the years, musicians in the Chicago area shuffled in and out of the band, including Chen’s brother Jonathan Chen until he moved to New York City. Kioto, who the brothers have known since she was little, added that the group was playing “for Jeremy” and that there was an “awareness” of him.

While introducing the band, Chen tied together the ideas of philosopher different from what actually unfolds,” said Braun. “You start to engage in a process of constant revision and constant clarification.”

Within the context of “¡Viva Maestro!,” Braun said that they set out to focus on the musical life of the conductor and the drama of the art world, with his home country of Venezuela and its current sociopolitical and economic issues — from hyperinflation to high crime and mortality rates — serving as an expositional backdrop. However, about six weeks into production, Braun said, “the problems of Venezuela exploded and changed the course of his life,” along with the film team’s access to the country and the people they had been filming.

Braun also works as a professor of cinematic arts and Joseph Campbell Endowed Chair of Cinematic Ethics at the University of Southern California. He said he accepted the position of ethics chair because “its place is actually central to everything that we do. That when you put a film out into the world, in some way or another, you’re inviting change,” no matter how

Cornel West, on jazz as an American art form, and jazz critic Stanley Crouch, on improvisation.

In referencing West’s idea of jazz bringing together diverse people, Chen said that he loves how the medium feels to be the representation of “this ideal of America.” Though the artist acknowledged the difficulty of reaching this kind of perfection, Chen still spoke to the importance of experimentation. He also took from a 2006

CONTRIBUTED BY JEREMY CHEN

interview with NPR, in which Stanley Crouch said, "in jazz, the improvisers create things at just about the same velocity that things are usually destroyed. And that, to me, is part of the excitement and the wonder of the art."

With the destruction brought by wars, shifting weather patterns and the global pandemic, Chen added, “Of all of these things, I just feel like we need things like this that are what bring us together to create something.”