Combining Movement, Wordless Voices, and Technology

Combining Movement, Wordless Voices, and Technology

A new performance piece by composer and multimedia artist Badie Khaleghian combines dance, human vocal sounds, and technology.

The cutting-edge work, called CHANT, comes out of a continuing collaboration between Khalegian and NobleMotion Dance, a contemporary dance company based in Houston, Texas, where Khaleghian worked and studied before coming to Bowdoin in 2024.

"The piece brings together movement, live voice, electronic music, projection, and interactive technology," said Khaleghian, who is Bowdoin's A. LeRoy Greason Assistant Professor in the Creative Arts. "The work imagines a future in which people are trying to recover forgotten forms of collective ritual, using chant as a way to reconnect with one another."

The project, he explained, started when NobleMotion came to Khaleghian with an idea they had been exploring for some time. "In their teaching and rehearsal process, dancers often use audible breathing or add sound to movement, and they were interested in seeing whether that practice could become an art form of its own."

When Khaleghian heard this, he immediately thought of Bowdoin colleague Kari Francis, who is both a choral director and a scholar of improvised group singing. "Her background made her a natural collaborator for a project built around collective voice, listening, and response," he said.

One of the project's major challenges, explained Khaleghian, is how to process the dancers' live voices as they perform. This meant using microphones, of course, but he did not want the mics to feel separate from the performance. "During a workshop over spring break, we experimented with ways the dancers could move with microphones and interact with them as physical objects." After that workshop, Khaleghian approached another Bowdoin colleague, Assistant Professor of Theater Germán Cárdenas-Alaminos, who has a background in scenic design, to create structures that could conceal the microphones while becoming part of the choreography.

What interests Khaleghian most about CHANT, he said, is how communal it is. "People are naturally sound makers, and chanting often develops through repetition, listening, and some form of call and response. At the same time, I wanted to avoid directly representing any particular chanting tradition. Instead, I began imagining what chant might sound like in a fictional world. Of course, that imagination is still shaped by the traditions I have heard and observed."

Another curious aspect to the piece, he stressed, is the intentional avoidance of any text, even though the human voice is one of the main sound sources. "Anything that sounds like a word is actually made from invented combinations of consonants and vowels. This allows the voice to communicate through breath, rhythm, texture, and physical energy rather than through literal language."

The world premiere of CHANT will take place on August 15, 2026, at MATCH (the Midtown Arts and Theater Center in Houston, Texas), with further performances on August 21 and 22. Click here to purchase tickets.