MEETING OF MINDS Receives National Recognition With Chamber Music America Award

Musiqa, NobleMotion Dance and the University of Houston IUCRC Brain Center have been awarded Chamber Music America's 2025 Interdisciplinary Collaboration of the Year for “Meeting of Minds”, a joint production with music by Anthony Brandt, choreography by Andy Noble and Dionne Sparkman Noble, visual design by Badie Khaleghian, and brain-computer interfacing (BCI) under the direction of Jose Luis Contreras-Vidal.  

Since its world premiere in Houston 2024, “Meeting of Minds” has been performed at the United Nations' “AI for Good” Summit in Geneva, Switzerland, the Music, Brain Health and Dementia Network Summit in Washington, DC, and at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MARCO) in Monterrey, Mexico.

“Meeting of Minds” is a groundbreaking combination of artistic performance and scientific experiment: as the dancers perform, they wear mobile brain-body imaging (MoBI) technology that record their brain activity and head motion.  The 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 BRAIN Center neuroengineering team monitors the dancers' brainwaves for the neural correlates of social engagement mapping these signals into control signals via the brain computer interface (BCI).  Thanks to live visualizations of the BCI data, the audience is able to observe what's happening inside the dancers' brains as they perform.

“For the dancers and musicians, ‘Meeting of Minds' was a chance to contribute to cutting edge research.  For the neuro-engineers, it was a chance to do beyond the laboratory and study the brain in real-world settings.  We're all deeply honored that Chamber Music America has honored this partnership,” said Musiqa Artistic Director Anthony Brandt.

“The longitudinal data emerging from “Meeting of Minds”, which captures coupled brain activity, music and dance, provides a unique opportunity to assay the creative process and understand the neural basis of social cognition and action. This information will be critical to develop music and dance-based prescriptions to improve brain health and wellbeing across the lifespan” said Cullen Distinguished Professor Jose Contreras-Vidal from the University of Houston.

“The opportunity to collaborate with innovators in music and neuroscience and be recognized by Chamber Music America is so meaningful,” said NobleMotion Dance Co-Artistic Director Andy Noble. “The more we learn about the brain, the more we understand the importance of mind-body connection. Movement is more than functional, it defines us. And dance is movement at its most expressive.”

"Meeting of Minds" was funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance. This project was 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. The University of Houston's Neuroengineering research team would like to acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF) IUCRC BRAIN Center award # 2137255 and the NSF AccelNet award # 2412731 on Growing Convergent Research to Advance Scientific Understanding and Applications of Coupled Brain Activity, Expressive Movement and Music.

More about the collaborators

Since its founding in 2002, Musiqa has performed the works of more than three hundred living composers – including over seventy world premieres – commissioned new works by established and emerging composers, collaborated with hundreds of dancers, actors, poets, filmmakers and other Houston artists, and provided free educational programs for tens of thousands of young people. Musiqa's national honors include two Commissioning Grants and two Awards for Adventurous Programming from Chamber Music America/ASCAP, a Fromm Foundation commission, and twelve education awards from the National Endowment for the Arts.  Musiqa co-founded the Cross-Country Chamber Consortium to help provide more opportunities for Black, Latinx and indigenous composers: last year's commission by Kyle Rivera was chosen as “Commission of the Year” by Chamber Music America.  The ensemble's commercial releases include a recording of Artistic Director Anthony Brandt's “LiveWire” and “Meeting of Minds” and an upcoming album of Sebastian Currier's “Deep-Sky Objects” and Trevor Weston's “Stars”—works commissioned and premiered by Musiqa.

NobleMotion Dance (NMD), one of Texas's premier dance companies, is recognized for their intense physicality, unique collaborations, and jaw-dropping performances. Since the organization's inception in 2009, NMD has collaborated with talented experts from a variety of disciplines including neuroscience, artificial intelligence, technology, and industrial design; composers and musicians; light and set artists; photographers, actors, and poets. Most notably, NMD was featured on the Emmy Award winning ABC TV show American Crime. NMD collaborated with Academy Award winner John Ridley to develop a four-minute dance that was shown in its entirety on primetime TV and drew an audience viewership of 4 million.  In 2015, 2016, and 2019, Houston Press named NMD “Houston's Best Dance Company.” The company was twice awarded the Mid-America Arts Alliance Innovations Grant for its innovative collaborations. Other accolades include over 50 positive reviews from national critics including publications in Entertainment Weekly, Dance Magazine, Dance Informa, and The Houston Chronicle. NMD was also featured in the New York Times Bestselling book Dancers Among Us.

Industry-University Cooperative Research Center for Building Reliable Advances and Innovation in Neurotechnologies (IUCRC BRAIN, https://nsfbrain.org) is a national center and international hub for the development and validation of innovative technologies that address the needs of the World's physically and neurologically impaired and the growing aging population. The BRAIN Center, led by Prof. Jose Contreras-Vidal,  accelerates the impact of basic research through close relationships between industry innovators, world-class academic teams, government leaders and our communities. The BRAIN Center leads the AccelNet International Network of Networks (NoN) on Growing Convergent Research to Advance Scientific Understanding and Applications of Coupled Brain Activity, Expressive Movement and Music. As part of its mission, the BRAIN Center's research and workforce development program addresses best design and engineering practices, computing tools and new computational methods to support early-stage medical device development, including for the delivery of music- and dance-based interventions using brain-computer interfaces, and their evaluation so that as a nation, we can keep up with the accelerated pace of technology development and innovation.

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