LiveWire: An Evening of Dance in Conversation with Music and Neuroscience

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 10, 2022

Contact: Andy Noble

Co-Artistic Director, NobleMotion Dance

Tel: 832-627-9664

E-mail: andy@noblemotiondance.com

Website: www.noblemotiondance.com

LiveWire: An evening of Dance in conversation with Music and Neuroscience

Photo by Lynn Lane

HOUSTON, TEXAS – January 10, 2022 – For two decades NobleMotion Dance and Musiqa have been breaking artistic boundaries in Houston and winning national acclaim for their adventurous programming. At the same time, Jose Luis Contreras-Vidal, director of the BRAIN Center at University of Houston and professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been pioneering nonsurgical brain-machine interfaces to understand the brain in action in clinical, artistic and classroom settings. For the first time, the groups converge to present the world premiere of LiveWire, an innovative collaboration between scientists, musicians, and dancers January 21 and 22, 7:30pm at The MATCH in midtown Houston. The dancers will perform LiveWire wearing EEG skull caps (brain caps) to a new string quartet by Anthony Brandt. The performance also includes NobleMotion’s premiere of The Spider’s Den set to Lei Liang’s Gobi Gloria as well as the Houston premieres of Pierre Jalbert’s Piano Quintet and Carlos Simon’s Loop for String Trio. NobleMotion’s dynamic Rhythm Study and artwork by Houston-based visual artist Emily Fens round out the program.
 
Until recently in human history, the arts provided perhaps the only way to get inside another person’s thoughts, whether that be through a Shakespearean monologue, a piano concerto, or a haiku. But technological breakthroughs are now giving us our first scientific insights into the human mind. LiveWire brings science into an internal landscape that previously has been the purview of the arts. Two years in the making, the evening’s titular work is a two-phase collaboration that begins in Houston and then goes on tour to Wolf Trap in April as part of an international Brain and Dance conference. LiveWire explores the latest neuroscience discoveries with each of its five movements showcasing a different process of the human brain. The choreography and projection design respond to the music and are abstract visual representations of the brain’s plasticity. Soloist Evelyn Toh, wearing a brain cap, guides the audience through the inner landscape of her mind. Additional dancers reveal her brain’s activity as they glide and carve out new pathways, much like neurons alive inside our heads. Contreras-Vidal’s team will deploy mobile brain-body imaging technology to listen, map and record the dancer’s brain activity as part of his project, ‘Your Brain on Dance,’ which furthers research into how the mind initiates spontaneous and prepared movement and internalizes artistic experiences. Audience members will watch this experiment take place in real time. EEG recordings of the dancers will be used as part of University of Houston research.
 
LiveWire will be performed again this spring at the 2022 International Workshop on the Neural and Social Bases of Creative Movement at Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts in Virginia. Our January performance provides Houston audiences with the chance to see this exciting new work before it reaches an international audience.

Tickets can be purchased online at www.matchouston.org or by calling 713-521-4533.

DETAILS

LiveWire

The MATCH – Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston

January 21 & 22 @7:30pm

Tickets: Pay-What-You-Can

Purchase online at www.matchouston.org or call 713.521.4533.

FOR HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGES

Contact: Andy Noble 

andy@noblemotiondance.com

832-627-9664 

Photo by Lynn Lane