Meeting of Minds
NobleMotion Dance, Musiqa, UH BRAIN Center
MEETING OF MINDS
15 Years
Celebrating 15 Years
Texas Premiere
Dance Company
M-AAA
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NOBLEMOTION & MUSIQA & UH BRAIN Center 

Meeting of Minds
NEXT STEPS

On the heels of the premiere of Meeting of Minds at MATCH in January performed to sold out houses, NMD artistic directors Andy and Dionne Noble, composer Anthony Brandt and musicians from Musiqa, projection artist Badie Khaleghian, and UH BRAIN Center director Dr. Jose Contreras-Vidal with Annel Pacheco Ramirez and Aime Aguilar Herrera, neuro-engineers, will tour the work to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland in May 2024 to be presented at “AI for Good” Global Summit

 

“Meeting of Minds” is a combination of artistic performance and scientific experiment: as the dancers perform, they wear mobile brain-body imaging (MoBI) technology that record their brain activity (electroencephalography, EEG), eye movements (electrooculography, EOG) and head motion.  Thanks to live visualizations of the data, the audience is able to observe what’s happening inside the dancers’ brains as they perform.

 

The 35-minute dance explores the process of building social connection.  The two dancers begin isolated from each other. Their first face-to-face encounter is frictional and combative.  In the final sections, they gradually work through their differences and arrive at mutual understanding.  Meanwhile, the neuro-engineering team from the University of Houston IUCRC BRAIN Center is monitoring the dancers’ brainwaves for the neural correlates of social interaction by estimating the intra- and inter-brain neural synchrony of the dancers. 

 

At first, the dancers’ movements are highly contrasting; then, as the dance unfolds, later sections focus on eye contact, touch and synchronized movement–all key signals of engagement and cooperation.  AI programs developed at Dr. Contreras-Vidal’s lab enable artifacts to be removed and the data to be analyzed in real time. 

 

A visualization of the live data is incorporated into the projections via a visual brain-computer interface operating on real time estimates of inter-brain synchrony: the brighter the visualization, the greater the synchrony between the two dancers’ brains. 

 

Meeting of Minds is funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance. This project is also generously funded by Rice University, Sam Houston State University, the University of Houston, the Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the state arts agencies of Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. The University of Houston’s Neuroengineering research team would like to acknowledge the support of the NSF IUCRC BRAIN Center (award # 2137255) as part of the Center’s STEAM research, training, and outreach program.

“Houston’s Best Dance Company”

Houston Press names Noblemotion Dance “Houston’s Best Dance Company.”

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NobleMotion Dance named "Best Dance Company"

Houston Press

“An audacious single-take capture of a modern dance performance, a beautifully performed thing unto itself that sensually expressed themes of community and divisiveness, exposure and hiddenness, relational violence and fraught intimacy, alienation and loneliness.”

Jeff Jensen, Entertainment Weekly Review of American Crime

“Nobles’ work had so many intricacies and illusions that were very pleasing to watch, that I could not help but muse over how it all came together.”

Tara Sheena, Dance Informa Review

“Mid-America Arts Alliance is proud to support the 2018 Artistic Innovation awardees, which represent the diversity of experimentation, collaboration, and creative expression occurring throughout our region,” says Todd Stein, M-AAA CEO.

NobleMotion Dance is awarded the Mid-America Arts Alliance Artistic Innovation Grant

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