Breton Tyner-Bryan and the Architecture of Ambition

Photography by Anka Garbowska

For Breton Tyner-Bryan, movement is never just movement. It is language, tension, memory, survival, and transformation all at once. As a filmmaker, choreographer, actor, writer, and editor, her work often exists in the space between physical expression and emotional revelation, where a gesture can say as much as a line of dialogue and ambition can become its own kind of choreography.

With Rhythm or Smooth, her feature directorial debut, Tyner-Bryan turns to the world of ballroom dance not simply for its spectacle, but for everything simmering beneath it. Set against the pulse of New York City, the film explores desire, class, reinvention, intimacy, and the complicated ways people perform who they are while reaching toward who they hope to become. What may first appear as a dance film expands into something more psychologically textured: a story about emotional hunger, creative endurance, and the fragile line between aspiration and illusion.

In conversation with LO’AMMI, Tyner-Bryan reflects on the social ecosystem of ballroom, the discipline of building chemistry between actors and dancers, the creative leap into feature filmmaking, and why stories of longing, identity, and transformation continue to pull her back into the work.

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"Rhythm or Smooth" seems deeply invested in the emotional and social dynamics surrounding ballroom dance, not just the spectacle of it. What first drew you to this world, and what did you want to explore through it that audiences might not expect?

I grew up in the ballet world and first experienced ballroom competitions through movies and television. I was drawn to the spectacle, the intensity, the technical precision, and the heart at the core of competing while sharing an art form that is centuries old. What continued to fascinate me about ballroom dance was the contradiction inside of it. On the surface, it’s elegance, beauty, glamour, and precision, but underneath there’s obsession, hierarchy, loneliness, performance, and survival. I became interested in the idea that people are not just dancing for trophies, they’re dancing for visibility, intimacy, identity, validation, community, joy, love, and the feeling of flight.

I wanted to explore ballroom dance not simply as a spectacle, but as a social ecosystem. In New York especially, ambition becomes its own currency, and ballroom felt like the perfect lens through which to examine desire, class, reinvention, and the cost of chasing proximity to power. Audiences may expect a dance film, but underneath it, this is really a story about emotional hunger and survival. I can’t think of a better setting for those dynamics than New York City.

You’ve described the film as being about “ego, appetite, and class,” with ambition acting as a kind of currency in New York. How did those themes shape the relationship between Ava and her dance partner throughout the story?

Ava’s relationship with her dance partner is completely defined by ambition until suddenly it’s not. What begins as a pursuit driven by competition, status, and the desire to win gradually transforms into something rooted in teamwork, camaraderie, trust, and ultimately joy. Those elements become the real currency that ignites their partnership beyond the experience of a singular victory.

Additionally, Ava and her partner need each other for completely different reasons, which creates the central tension between them. But beneath all of that, both characters are still driven by a profound love of dance, and ultimately their shared passion becomes the thing that unites them. I was  interested in how ambition can distort relationships, and in New York, people often fall in love with the idea of what someone represents just as much as who they actually are.

Your work often blends movement, emotion, and visual storytelling in a very fluid way. As someone who is also a choreographer and editor, how do those disciplines influence the way you direct performances and construct scenes?

Choreography and editing both rely on rhythm, tension, timing, and emotional architecture, so I naturally think of scenes musically. Even silence has a cadence to me. I’m constantly thinking about momentum, breath, restraint, collision, and how energy moves between people inside a frame.

Timing is everything, and I don’t like to overwork actors. Sometimes it’s about letting them find the take and discover their own voice within a scene without too many notes. Other times, it’s about being very present and specific, then creating enough freedom for them to lean fully into their particular instincts and performance. I’m always searching for the individual, the unexpected, the unique delivery that suddenly makes a moment feel alive and completely truthful.

Being a choreographer for the past 2 decades, my eye and whole being is trained to utilize all aspects of the body as a physicalized vehicle for storytelling. A gesture, glance, eye line placement, most powerfully reveal the inner workings of a character and their motivations.  Editing has taught me emotional economy and precision, how to strip a moment down to its essence and how long it takes to communicate the depth of that scene. Choreography and editing also go hand in hand for me because they function like a beautifully layered tapestry, constantly informing one another through rhythm, placement, movement, and structure. Both are fluid processes that can evolve, shift, and adapt depending on what the story ultimately needs.

This is your feature directorial debut after building such an acclaimed body of short-form work. What challenged you most about making the leap to a feature, and what surprised you creatively during the process?

I felt ready to direct a feature for quite some time. It was more a matter of which project was going to enter production first and what story felt large enough emotionally and visually to sustain that kind of experience. The biggest shift with a feature is the endurance required to maintain excellence over a long period of time while also protecting the actors and their performances. You’re building and sustaining an entire emotional world while constantly adapting and problem solving in real time. Pivoting is essential, and having a team that can move at that speed together is something truly sublime. Every day requires flexibility, stamina, communication, and focus, but it’s important that the pressure of production never compromises the emotional truth of the performances.

Communication is essential to maintaining both efficiency and camaraderie on a set. Film is an intensely collaborative medium, and I really believe strong teams are built through direct communication and trust. Sometimes the clearest solution is simply picking up the phone or speaking face to face rather than getting lost in endless emails

“Rhythm or Smooth” brings together trained actors, champion ballroom dancers, and performers from very different creative backgrounds. How did you approach creating a shared rhythm and chemistry between everyone on set?

I wanted everyone to feel grounded in the same emotional world, even if they came from completely different disciplines and training backgrounds. Ballroom dance itself became the shared language.

The performers on set were incredibly respectful and supportive of one another’s talents, and I think that mutual admiration naturally created chemistry. The dancers inherently created a very focused and disciplined dynamic, and many of our actors and leads also came from dance training, musical backgrounds, conservatory programs, or ensemble performance experience. That collective discipline really set the stage for excellence, especially given the level of focus and ability required to work creatively under intense time constraints.

There was also a very specific New York tension and energy on set that created some of the funniest and most electric performances in the film. New York actors and New York dancers have a particular hustle and heart imbued into them from coming up in this city. There’s a sharpness, resilience, humor, and survival instinct that naturally shaped the chemistry between everyone.

You both directed the film and appear in it as an actor. How did you navigate balancing those two roles emotionally and practically during production?

It’s a level of intensity that I genuinely relish. It requires me to think 360 degrees at all times and move quickly between emotional, technical, and logistical realities. Directing requires constant external awareness while acting demands vulnerability, instinct, and presence, so moving between those modes became part of the rhythm of the process.I also wrote the script, which gave me a very deep understanding of each scene, the rhythm of the dialogue, the blocking, emotional pacing, and how to best support the cast throughout the process.

This would not have been possible without my collaboration with cinematographer Michael J. Burke. We’ve worked together on multiple films that I’ve directed and acted in together, so there’s already a deep creative shorthand and trust between us. I personally like either a very specific note when I’m acting or almost no note at all. Having worked professionally in performance for so long, blocking and specificity come very naturally to me, which allows me to focus more fully on the emotional life and rhythm of the scene as a whole.

It’s actually very natural for me because I spent a decade building original shows with my dance company, Breton Follies, where I was often simultaneously performing while handling end to end producing logistics, casting, advertising, costumes, ticketing, and marketing. I became very accustomed to thinking creatively and logistically at the same time.

The first Breton Follies show is actually a funny example of that preparation. I wasn’t even supposed to perform in it, and then the day before the show I had to suddenly replace another dancer and go on myself. Experiences like that probably trained me early on to pivot quickly under pressure and remain calm inside chaos.

Across projects like Bloom, West of Frank, and now Rhythm or Smooth, your films seem especially interested in people striving toward something just out of reach. What keeps drawing you back to stories about ambition, longing, and transformation?

I think transformation is inherently cinematic. I’m fascinated by people constructing identities, chasing reinvention, trying to outrun themselves, or trying to become worthy of the life they imagine. There’s beauty in aspiration performance, but also danger in it. Sometimes it’s good to sit at the beach, but as they say dancers are like horses, they are born to run.

A lot of my work lives in that tension between fantasy and reality,  who we are versus who we perform ourselves to be. I’m interested in characters who are reaching for something just beyond their grasp because there’s vulnerability, desperation, hope, and illusion all existing at the same time. That feels very human to me, appetite, and ego, and the fragility underneath it all.

Between developing television projects, writing for stage musicals, acting, and directing upcoming thrillers, your creative world spans so many mediums. At this stage in your career, what kinds of stories feel most urgent or exciting for you to tell next?

The stories that feel most urgent to me right now are ones centered around redemption, humor, longing, identity, and human connection. I’m especially interested in stories that reveal how interconnected we all are through intergenerational experiences, shared emotional inheritances, and the ways people carry love, loss, ambition, and survival across time.

Humor feels like a return for me creatively. I’m especially excited about developing new film to musical adaptations within the comedy space and exploring how humor, music, movement, and heightened emotional storytelling can coexist inside the same world. Some of the funniest people I know are also the most emotionally complex, and I think comedy can reveal truth in ways drama sometimes cannot.

I’m also very interested in developing worlds and characters across different forms of IP and allowing stories to evolve beyond a single medium. I love discovering what elements of a story belong in film versus television, theater, music, movement, or live performance, and how those forms can deepen or expand one another. Some stories want intimacy, others want scale, and some want the longevity of serialized storytelling.

I love being on set in different parts of the world. The energy of a location inevitably enters the film almost like another leading character, and I love that exchange between environment, performance, and atmosphere. Place carries emotion, rhythm, tension, memory, and texture, and I’m always interested in how a world itself can shape the psychology of a story.

At the center of all of it for me is collaboration with actors. Working with performers is one of the most fulfilling parts of the process, and I deeply miss that exchange during the early development stages or once a project reaches its final stages. There’s something incredibly alive about building emotional worlds together in real time, and that human collaboration is always what pulls me back into the work.