Great live performances are built to stay with you. A breath, a movement, a phrase suspended in the air—the moment fades, but what it leaves in the heart, the mind, the soul does not.

Pacific Chorale presented To the Hands at Samueli Theater in September 2024 – for those in attendance, the experience was singular. The GRAMMY® Award-winning resident chorus of Segerstrom Center for the Arts had created something that moved beyond the conventions of a concert: an intimate choral-theatrical production in which music, movement, light, and imagery confronted homelessness, displacement, and the human need to belong. To the Hands is a sacred lament and a powerful testament on community, vulnerability, and empathy.

Cameras were rolling to capture this unique live experience.

The production began with a precise artistic choice by Pacific Chorale Artistic Director Robert Istad. He placed Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands beside the 1680 work that inspired it, Dieterich Buxtehude’s Ad manus from Membra Jesu nostri.

Buxtehude’s Baroque cantata contemplates the wounded hands of Christ. More than three centuries later, Shaw turns those hands outward. Her work brings refugees, borders, and human displacement into the frame, asking a question as intimate as it is immense: what are the wounds in the midst of our hands?

Istad extended that dialogue across a carefully shaped program of works by living composers and songwriters including Moira Smiley, Sarah McLachlan, Kevin Siegfried, Ken Burton, Shawn Kirchner, and Ysaÿe Barnwell. Under the theatrical direction of Marty Austin Lamar, the music unfolded through choreography, projection, and light. Data about homelessness in Orange and LA counties were woven into the presentation, bringing the work’s global concerns into immediate closeness with the audience.

The intimacy of Samueli Theater was essential. 16 singers, a string quintet from Delirium Musicum, a pianist, and five dancers occupied the space not as separate forces, but as a single expressive body. Voices emerged from movement; visual images entered the music; light and darkness highlighted these forces; even silence became part of the experience.

The result did not lecture or prescribe. It created a space in which ancient sacred music, contemporary choral writing, popular song, and the realities of the present could mirror and enhance one another.

Anyone who has been transformed by a live performance knows the difficulty of preserving it. A recording can document what happened, but rarely can it hold the atmosphere in the room—the concentration of the artists, the tension of silence, or the emotional current passing between stage and audience.

To the Hands accomplished something rarer. Filmed live between its two performances, the 62-minute work captured the immediacy of the original production without reducing it to a record of an event. The camera became a new angle, preserving the force of the ensemble while drawing the viewer into the intense expression of raw acoustic performance.

The recording is, in a sense, lightning held in a bottle: a live performance conceived for one room and one moment, now able to meet viewers through another medium without surrendering its theatrical intention.

The independent film has carried To the Hands far beyond its first audiences at Segerstrom Center. In October 2025, the film received its world premiere as an Official Selection of the Newport Beach Film Festival—an especially meaningful homecoming for an Orange County-based project created and filmed by local artists.

The premiere opened a wider journey. To the Hands has now received recognition from 15 film festivals in the United States and internationally, affirming that the questions at its center cross geographic and cultural boundaries. The film festival recognition as an arthouse and cinematic choral-theatrical experience is just part of the journey of To the Hands.

This fleeting live experience was preserved—and will be shared widely thanks to the support from Producing Sponsors David and Darrellyn Melilli, co-sponsors Segerstrom Center for the Arts and National Endowment of the Arts, and additional support from Pacific Chorale’s Artistic Innovation Fund and the Ron Rudderow Legacy Fund.

This November, To the Hands makes its broadcast debut with PBS SoCal and begins streaming worldwide.

For those who experienced the original production, the film offers a return to Samueli Theater and a closer view of details that could only be glimpsed from one point of view. For those encountering the work for the first time, it offers a striking example of how live acoustic choral art reaches beyond sound—drawing theater, film, and social consciousness into a single, deeply human experience.

To the Hands does not offer easy answers. It asks us to remain present with difficult questions: whom we welcome, whose suffering we allow ourselves to see, and what we are willing to hold in our hearts.

Every live performance comes to an end. What To the Hands awakened did not end—its spirit stays with us and changes us forever.

Visit pacificchorale.org/tothehands for release details.