Double bassist Laura Dykes and wind player Aryn Ward stepped up to a mural at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts and began to play it. Their Oct. 10 performance was one half of this season’s Dimensions Variable, the series of live performances and interactive experiences the Moody stages for every fall and spring exhibition. In the neighboring central gallery, Danza Azteca Macuilxochitl presented Mesoamerican dance, music and ceremony, traditions the group carries forward through lineage-based relationships with teachers in Mexico and passes between generations.
Both performances drew from “Radiant Geometries: Vectors of Knowledge from the Indigenous Americas,” an exhibition on the math, science and technology embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems. The mural Dykes and Ward played is a new commission by Diné artist Nanibah Chacon, an interactive sound installation in the Brown Foundation Gallery.
“The wavelengths emitted from this piece are permeable, an ancient technology known and practiced by our ancestors through all cultures,” Chacon said in remarks before the performance. “It is why sound is a part of prayer and capable of healing.”
Dykes and Ward of the Houston nonprofit Nameless Sound put that technology to work with an original score.
“This is something that I’ve dreamed about since creating this piece, allowing for new temporal and experimental work to be experienced,” Chacon said.
Visitors get their turn too. Chacon made the installation for anyone to play, and she said finding its meaning is up to each person who does. “Radiant Geometries” is on view through Dec. 19, and admission is free.