Meeting of the Minds

Musiqa and NobleMotion are proud to present three world premieres by Anthony Brandt, Badie Khaleghian and Marcus Maroney, as well as Karim Al-Zand’s Cabinet of Curiosities. Join us on January 19 and 20 at MATCH for an evening of artistic and scientific exploration unlike anything else on Houston stages.

MEETING OF MINDS
Composed by Musiqa Artistic Director Anthony Brandt and choreographed by Andy and Dionne Noble, Meeting of Minds is an exploration of neural synchrony in 10 short movements for two string quartets – one pre-recorded, and the other live. Thematically, the piece delves into the notion of transitioning from polarization to a state of mutual understanding. Performed by Astrid Nakamura and Nanki Chugh (violins), Molly Wise (viola) and Christopher Ellis (cello), and danced by Lauren Serrano and Tyler Orcutt, Meeting of Minds music, dance, neuro-engineering and artificial intelligence to explore the inner workings of the human brain. The dancers will wear EEG caps during their performances to measure electrical activity in their brains and neural synchrony. The projection design by Badie Khaleghian will respond to the live EEG data with abstract visual representations of the brain’s plasticity. Meeting of Minds is the continuation of Musiqa’s pioneering partnership with and NobleMotion Dance, Jose Luis Contreras-Vidal and the University of Houston BRAIN Center. The first collaboration – LiveWire, in January 2022 – was wildly successful in Houston and reprised at the 2022 International Workshop on the Neural and Social Bases of Creative Movement at Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts in Virginia.

CABINET OF CURIOSITIES
Composed by Musiqa Artistic Board member Karim Al-Zand, Cabinet of Curiosities is a diverse collection of six short works for clarinet and piano, each with a peculiar and idiosyncratic character. Named for the elaborate cupboard used as a repository of diverse and exotic objects, the assembly of which was a popular pastime for the affluent European of the 16th and 17th centuries, Al Zand’s Cabinet of Curiosities was originally written for a consortium of twenty clarinetists in 2009. Our performance features the Harlequin Duo – Nicholas Davies (clarinet) and Wesley Ducote (piano).

KHALEGHIAN
Fresh off a successful presentation of Unchained earlier this year, composer and multimedia artist Badie Khaleghian has created a new work. Study no. 1: the Art of Collaboration results from a close partnership between the Khaleghian and choreographers Andy and Dionne Noble. This piece blends synthesized and recorded sounds, merging musique concrète with the latest new-age beats sourced from social media reels. The collaborative process was influenced by the concept of neural synchrony, which refers to the way neurons in the brain fire together in patterns. To express this, a group of six dancers immersed in a world of networks and webs will build a community of healthy co-existence.

THE TELLING
The final world premiere on the program is a new work by Musiqa Artistic Board member Marcus Karl Maroney. The Telling features vibrant choreography by Andy and Dionne Noble for an ensemble of eight dancers and an energetic score performed by Nakamura, Chugh, Wise and Ellis.

Meeting of Minds is funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.
This project is also generously funded by Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the state arts agencies of Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas.”