This is the second episode in the fourth season of WYSO’s original series, Studio Visit.
The series explores artists and the inspirations behind their work. Susan Byrnes, a WYSO community voices producer who has been making art for over 30 years, created it.
This season, Byrnes explores ideas from her new show, “Lightness and Weight,” now on display at the Contemporary Dayton Gallery. In this episode, she explains how a dance performance became part of the show.
Studio Visit is produced for the ear and designed to be heard, not read. We strongly encourage you to listen to the audio by clicking on the blue “LISTEN” button above, which includes emotion and emphasis not on the page.
Susan Byrnes: When I was installing my recent show at the Contemporary Dayton, I put out an Instagram post. I got a message back right away from Nicola (or Niki, as I call her) Resto, who’s been a friend and collaborator for 25 years.
“Lightness and weight, which is the name for the entire exhibition that you created, just seemed like to have such a dance quality to it, because really, a great dancer, a great athlete, has those two qualities really perfected.” Niki said, “Because if you’re only light, there’s just no depth to anything. And if you’re only weighted, then that kind of doesn’t have a lot of nuance. And so I just thought that that was a really interesting way to title an exhibit. And I wanted to respond.”
Niki enlisted her husband, musician, and composer Luis Resto, and dancer Katie Moorhead for the project. Because we all live in different cities, we Zoomed a lot.
We chose to use my artwork “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” a large installation made of dozens of tulle petticoats hung like clouds from the ceiling, with heavy cast iron cow bones lying on the ground, like in a pasture. Katie would dance to Luis’s composition “Menagerie in E Minor,” with the added the sound of a cowbell. That was Niki’s idea.
“I was interested in exploring having this cowbell around Katie’s neck at first, and now we ended up putting it on her back. The cows have the bells because you don’t want them to wander off too far. And it sort of resonated with women as well, like you’re given these opportunities, but are they really because you can’t really stray too far from the center,” Niki said. “We talked a lot about what it’s gonna feel like to dance with this bell. And it’s got that quite obnoxious sound. But I think that there is this tension of disturbance with this beautiful moving body and this tutu that somehow is very close to what you’re creating in the space with these petticoats in the top, and then these bones of a cow, this huge pelvis in iron. And so I just kind of thought that somehow this bell for me is what brought it all together.”
I was there the first time Katie and Niki rehearsed in the gallery. It takes a special kind of dancer to wear a cowbell and dance with art, and that’s Katie Moorhead.
“I think the beautiful thing about dance, and dance in really any particular time of history, was it needed to be wherever it was a possibility.” Katie said, “When I perform in a museum, it’s 360 degrees because people could be moving around. And I am a live, real piece of sculpture.”
In this piece, Katie is the only live being among bones, remains of the dead, so “Remains” is what Niki titled the dance.
Nicola Resto
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Contributed
“The remains part was really fascinating to me that somehow we live our past experiences in some way, even of generations past, people that we might not know at all, but somehow they kind of transcend through us in some ways.” Niki said, “So as we started thinking about how the remains connect to our histories as women, as artists, as dancers, somehow then it started coming full circle. And then we had lots of conversations with Katie about how to bring that to life.”
Katie runs through it again, this time with music.
“Oh man, amazing Katie.” Niki said, “The light is amazing, the costume is amazing. It’s so so beautiful.”
“Lightness and Weight,” is on display at the Contemporary Dayton Gallery.
Studio Visit is supported by The Contemporary Dayton Gallery and produced at The Eichelberger Center for Community Voices at WYSO.
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