Details:
Musiqa, NobleMotion Dance and the University of Houston BRAIN Center present Sound & Motion – a fusion of music, dance, immersive projection design, and cutting-edge neuro-engineering. The evening will feature music by Anthony Brandt, Marcus Maroney, and more, with choreography by Andy and Dionne Noble – offering a unique blend of artistic and scientific exploration that promises to be unlike anything seen on Houston stages. Meeting of Minds is a collaborative music and dance performance that explores the neural dynamics of social interaction by tracing a relationship’s transformation from polarization to mutual understanding. This work features choreography by Andy and Dionne Noble and a score by Anthony Brandt comprised of 10 short movements for two string quartets – one pre-recorded, and the other live. Meeting of Minds integrates music, dance, neuro-engineering and artificial intelligence to explore the inner workings of the human brain. During the performance, dancers will be wearing mobile brain-body imaging caps, monitored through a brain-computer interface (BCI), by a team of neuro-engineers from the University of Houston’s BRAIN Center led by Cullen Distinguished Professor Jose L Contreras-Vidal. Audience members will watch this experiment take place in real-time. Visualizations of the live EEG data, conceptualized by multimedia artist Badie Khaleghian, will be displayed on screen. This pioneering research study–developed in Houston—has implications for brain-machine interfaces, the understanding of how brains synchronize, and music’s potential as a medical intervention. In 2025 Meeting of Minds was named the Best Interdisciplinary Performance by Chamber Music America. The Telling captures the moment right before a challenging confession. An ensemble of dancers falls, twists, and flails through the space, “stumbling over their thoughts” in anxiety as the truth is released. The energetic music score is composed by Marcus Karl Maroney. “It’s mostly about the nervousness and hesitation about being vulnerable. For me, the work doesn’t ‘say’ what the aftermath of the telling is… it is about the energy immediately before or during,” states Maroney. With more new work currently in development, Musiqa, NobleMotion Dance, and the UH Brain Center are proud to be returning to Miller Outdoor Theatre for the second year in a row with more adventurous programming and new work for Houston audiences. Led by four composers, Musiqa’s mission is to enrich and inspire our community through programs that integrate new music with other modern art-forms. With its innovative collaborations and educational programming, Musiqa strives to make modern repertoire accessible and vital to audiences of all ages and musical backgrounds. All performances at Miller Outdoor Theatre are FREE!
