[upbeat music] - In this edition of WLIW Arts Beat.

[upbeat music] A dance about identity.

- It's really, really important.

Mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, auntie, uncle, see the show, because what I would love to happen is everybody goes home that night and then they talk about it.

[upbeat music] - [Diane] An inventive vocal ensemble - I don't think that we've even come close to scratching the surface of all the artistic things that we can do.

One of the really unique things about Seraphic Fire is that we don't really repeat repertoire.

[woman singing] - [Diane] The grand reopening of a contemporary art museum.

- It allows us to be nimble, allows us to not beholding to a collection that we have to show something every so often, you know, because it's in storage somewhere.

- Designing an artificial fly.

We as close as we can, imitate the natural insect that lives in the river.

[guitar music] - It's all ahead on this edition of WLIW Arts Beat.

Funding for WLIW Arts Beat was made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

[jazzy music] Welcome to WLIW Arts Beat, I'm Diane Masciale.

In this segment, we meet Dominic Moore-Dunson, a dancer and choreographer, who created the Black Card Project.

This dance theater production, explores African-American identity, culture and history.

We head to Ohio to find out more.

[jazzy music] - In sixth grade, Miller South, I'm sitting with the seven other black boys in my grade at the time, and we're all sitting at the same lunchroom table.

And we're talking about what we wanted to be when we grew up and one of them says, I wanna be in the NBA, I wanna play like LeBron and other ones were, I wanna be in the NFL, I wanna be like Michael Vick.

When it was my turn to say something, I said, well, I wanna dance in Paris or play professional soccer in England.

And there was this deafening silence that we were on the table and one of my friends looks at me and says, "Bruh, that ain't black."

And all the kids started laughing.

There's this overarching feeling that like, well, if I don't know this about the black culture if I don't know this kinda music, I'm not black enough.

If I don't like this kinda food, I'm not black enough.

You know, sometimes I feel like, I was supposed to learn how to be black somewhere.

But nobody, there's no program to learn how to be black.

And I kinda sat for a while and I was like, what if there was a school?

What does a school where you like someone learned how to be black?

And that's where it started.

And I was like, what if there's this kinda weird, interesting character, who's kinda like me, but like a different version of me in head and what if, you know, he kinda went through all these classes and it kinda felt like a really weird version of The Wizard of Oz, because you have a single character who runs into all these different characters and learns all this stuff.

So, it's kinda like the structure that we used.

Kevin Parker, when I asked him to collaborate on the show I didn't know really what the show was yet.

I was talking to him.

We went out to an Applebee's and we sat down.

I was like, so I have this idea.

I kinda want to talk to you about like what does it means to be black?

And we started just like joking and laughing about all of these things that we knew about.

Firestone high school, which is my Alma Mater.

I graduated from Firestone in 2008.

It's hard to talk about how important it is to me, because this moment is full circle.

At 14-years-old, I was learning the foundations of what it meant to be a creator.

At the same time I was dealing with all these internal struggles of, well, can I dance?

Should I be dancing?

Can I play soccer?

Should I be playing soccer?

But coming into this place, it was like a very safe space for me to explore who I really, really knew I was as an artist at a such young age and to be, you know 16 years later bringing my 90 minute work, a very large work for somebody around my age and knowing that, wow, just a couple of hundred feet that way while I was on stage, I started this process.

- I would say I've never really seen a show quite like this.

This was completely different.

The fact that it only had two people in it, doing an entire story was like enough at that to set it aside from most things I've seen.

I guess I never really thought about a black card, like ever having a black card and like realizing that like it is a thing like, oh like there are things that I don't know about, but like happened within my community.

- I would say the slight, stereotypical newness of it.

It was pretty funny.

Like the little gangster walk and the stereotypical clothing.

It was pretty funny.

The problem with humor is, it's actually the hardest thing to do on stage, 'cause you have to think about your own biases as what you think is funny versus what other people think is funny, so that's one of the first barriers.

Inside of this conversation we wanted to use humor, because we wanted to pull people into our world and making people laugh, always does that.

You wanna pull people into the show before you hit them with the really hard topics.

We couldn't start the show with the history section because it's too raw and it feels too close to home.

So, you invite people in by making things funny by making them fun, playing their favorite music and all of a sudden they're willing to go on the journey with you no matter where you take them.

And we realized that's what we needed to do, because like I've seen a lot of modern dance shows and often when we talk about race, the piece is very heavy.

And a lot of time you'll see people are sitting forward, start to lean back and disengaged, because it feels like too much for them.

So, we were like, okay, well, what if we did the opposite?

What if over time we got 'em to lean forward and then they would stay there.

So, it was also taking that idea of like we have these characters where these stereotypes, but what if we broke the stereotype and made you learn something about them that change you a little bit.

C.T.

Payne, who's the thug, he doesn't think he's funny, he's very, very serious, but as you saw on the show today, the kids will laugh as soon as they see him.

The part that was really difficult actually was making sure every character had integrity and it wasn't my emotional feelings about that character that came out, because me and Kevin talked about, we can't be hypocrites.

We can't say there's no one way to be black and then say, well, the way the thug's doing it is wrong.

[dramatic music] And I knew I wanted to do something that had to do with black history but I didn't know what.

So, I was just going through clips and things like that.

And one day I had this dream that I was running and I was just like, you know there's a slave master, what it means, there must be dog happening, and all these stuff.

And then I had another dream about being in the Jim Crow South and what that felt like.

And then I had another dream right after that, that was like the sixties Black Panther movement.

And then another dream that was kinda being this Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice type character.

So, this section is actually, literally a dream I had.

- All you can really hear is whippings and getting hit with batons and all of that.

And I would say that that kinda is really reflectful on our history.

I feel like that was probably the part that made it most impactful, was just like the way they drawn in the audio with the dancing and I would say, like that all just came in and made it so powerful.

[loud bang] - I would love for this piece to tour nationally.

To tour to all these large cities especially where there's a large African-American population and to get into the schools just like we did here, but also the show is also built for the students, also their families.

It's really, really important.

Mom, dad, grandma and grandpa, auntie, uncle, see the show, because what I would love to happen is everybody goes home that night and then they talk about it.

That's the point, right?

The mission of this project is to create conversation around the narrow aspects of the black identity and then how that relates to economic development in the black community.

This is living proof that you can literally do whatever you want to do and even though you may get hit, you may get hurt, you may get brung down a little, you'll still be you and be able to go forward to wherever you're trying to achieve.

Today was the first performance where I could see the audience a little bit, but it felt like 80 to 90% of the audience was the exact target audience the show was for and it gave me a sense of like, this is why we did this.

- For more information about the production, visit inletdance.org.

[jazzy music] And now, the artist's quote of the week.

[jazzy music] Flores Seraphic Fire is a vocal ensemble with a wide ranging repertoire that attracts attention and admiration from medieval to modern works.

Their performances are full of artistry and style.

Take a listen.

[women singing] - Hildegard is the first known composer.

She's the first person that has her name written on a piece of music that we can trace it back to a historical person.

Everyone before her was grouped under the same title of anonymous.

[women singing] My name is Patrick Quigley, I'm the founder and artistic director of Seraphic Fire.

[women singing] This is in fact, the opening of our 18th season.

We're quite a versatile ensemble.

So, we perform music from the medieval era starting somewhere in 800 AD, but also from the Baroque classical, romantic and modern periods.

[woman singing] A lot of what we do is trying to make the music sound like what the composer thought it would sound like.

We do not perform with amplification.

We're entirely acoustic ensemble.

[women singing] Whenever we're performing music that is more than say, 500 years old, we have to participate in some sort of musical archeology.

This is particularly appropriate for this concert.

Hildegard of Bingen was born at the end of the 11th century.

This piece was written probably sometime between 1140 and 1150 AD.

At eight-years-old, her parents committed her to religious life.

It was written for a community of women that Hildegard was the leader of and so she was a visionary.

She had received ecstatic visions and one of her visions was that she should take her women out of the monastery that they were sharing with a group of Benedictine monks and move it to the ruins of an older monastery.

This piece we think was written for the dedication of that new monastery.

[woman singing] It's written in a style and in a musical language that we don't have the key to anymore.

We know the notes that she wrote and we know the order that they come in and we know the words that were underneath them, but everything else is something that we've had to reconstruct.

Hildegard only wrote one line of music.

At the time that Hildegard was writing, we hadn't actually gotten to the point where we had multiple lines of music being written on top of each other.

The vocal quality of women's singing in unison creates this sort of other worldly sound.

[woman singing] Particularly when all of them are singing the exact same notes at the same time, which is very difficult.

[woman singing] The story is about a woman who is trying to choose between a life of the world and a life with the virtues, who are in a more celestial realm.

It's remarkable because it's so high.

It's a very, very high piece of music.

[woman singing] And it's in a different mode at the time that Hildegard was composing, we didn't have keys in the way that we have like C major, C minor, D major, D minor.

They only had the white keys on the piano.

[woman singing] Sing into the interesting things about your line.

I don't think that we've even come close to scratching the surface of all the artistic things that we can do.

One of the really unique things about Seraphic Fire is that we don't really repeat repertoire.

In this performance, one of the reasons that we're doing it is not only, because it's a great piece of music, but it's performed so seldomly that we hope that our performance and our recording of it will be something that will encourage other people to take this on as a project.

And it shows just how much the contribution of women to music was being made, even in the 12th century.

[audience claps] - [Diane] Discover more at seraphicfire.org.

Now here's a look at this month fun fact.

[jazzy music] Up next, we get an inside look at the reopening of MassArt, Art Museum in Boston, Massachusetts.

As a non collecting museum, the space is ever-changing.

A wide range of contemporary works are always on display.

- Here we are, your brand new museum.

- Yay.

- Congratulations.

- Thank you.

- What's the one bit of advice you wanna give people who haven't been here yet?

- I want to feel like this is their space, that we are a welcoming place to come and hang out in our Arnie Glimcher Plaza and to come visit and to visit often, because we are a temporary exhibition space that will change up our shows year round.

Wanna come in?

Yes.

- I do, I'm so excited about this.

- Gerard, welcome to MAAM.

- Thank you.

Lisa Tung is the museum's executive director and happy to be rid of the old MassArt galleries, a waren of winding ways that, despite the art on view, felt very much like the former gymnasium it once was.

- We were really just spaces.

There was a space to show, a show, a space to show in another show, but there was no lobby, like we're standing in right now.

and there was no front door.

- [Gerard] But after a 20 month, 12 and a half million dollar renovation, MassArt has reopened as a full-fledged museum with free admission.

Tung calls it a kunsthalle, the German word for a non-collecting museum.

- Allows us to be nimble, allows us to not be beholden to a collection that we have to show something every so often, you know, because it's in storage somewhere, it allows us to respond to today's topics and dialogue and ideas of artists.

- [Gerard] In the lobby, you'll find an installation by Brooklyn based artist duo, Ghost of a Dream.

- We gave Ghost, 30 years worth of exhibition of ephemera, catalogs, posters, newspaper clippings, postcards and they have created a kaleidoscopic patterning of madness.

- [Gerard] It's now game time for the new museum and one of its first exhibitions.

Game-Changers is a show of video games at play with much to say.

Tracy Fullerton's Walden, invites a slowing down with demerits for a competitive pace.

Momo Pixel's Hair Nah, is born out of people's predilections for touching a black woman's hair, unsolicited and artists and MassArt professor, Juan Obando, hacked the popular pro evolution soccer game, to create pro revolution soccer.

[speaks in a foreign language] His game inserts members of Mexico's Zapatista Army of National Liberation or EZLN, a civil resistance group onto the soccer field.

It's based on a proposed match that never materialized.

EZLN, he says, are not unlike computer and game hackers.

- I thought that the metaphor was very, very clear.

People are intervening, the system is no different from the way that EZLN has intervened, the Mexican system.

- [Gerard] Upstairs in the museum's main gallery, a jaw dropping installation by Lisbon based artist, Joanna Vasconcelos.

- Any museum can put sculpture on the floor, but I wanted the first show to show something that we'd never done before which is, completely suspend something up in the sky.

And I was a little selfish.

I wanted to bring an artist who had never shown in Boston before.

- How do you want people to feel when they are underneath or do you want people to feel when they're underneath?

- Well, the idea is that this piece has a kind of a movement, she's flying in that direction and of course she has a center and this center is like any chapel, any cathedral.

- [Gerard] She would be the latest in the artist's Valkyries series, in which she's created pieces around the world including in Paris, London and Bilbao.

- The Valkyries are goddesses, flying goddesses, warriors and they will fly over the battlefield and they will bring alive the brave warriors.

- [Gerard] Here, the museum is the battlefield.

A place fast Vasconcelos says, where the spirit of art and dreams are revived.

The piece is named for and inspired by Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman, an enslaved Massachusetts woman who was the first to sue for her freedom.

- And I was like, okay, this was an incredible woman without knowledge, without being able to read or to write she fought for her rights and for freedom.

That's the spirit of the Valkyries.

- [Gerard] Vasconcelos' Valkyries are made in her Lisbon studio, a space for magic, as she describes it.

Teams of assistants craft the works out of deliberately chosen fabrics.

In this case, they come from Mozambique, a nod to Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman's history and they are beings, she says.

- You can look into this as an animal, or you can look into this as a plant or as a monster from the sea world.

You can look into this from a lot of angles.

It's not upon me to decide which one.

- Why not, you made it?

- Yeah, I know but I like to make open things, so you can analyze it, choose whatever connects with you.

That's the idea.

- [Gerard] One writ large, very large.

- [Diane] Check out more at massart.edu.

And here's a look at this week's art history.

[jazzy music] When anglers are tying flies, they aren't just completing a task, they are also making a work of art.

We traveled to Nevada to see how these artificial flies are designed.

[lighthearted guitar music] - For most anglers, fly fishing is an escape.

Being on the river, forgetting about work, forgetting about bills and being able to encounter some amazing fish while being in a beautiful place, surrounded by great settings.

It's one of the draws for fly fishing.

[guitar music] Flies are imitations of insects that are actually waterborne that's the fish's main food source are insects.

So, what we do is we use natural and synthetic materials like Hare's ear, or sometimes even rubber or plastic.

And we, as close as we can, imitate the natural insect that lives in the river.

[guitar music] So, when we go into tying a specific fly, the first thing I'm gonna do is think about its size, its shape, what I'm actually imitating when it comes to the natural insect.

My process would start by selecting the hook, selecting whether it needs to be heavy or if it needs to float.

So, I would take the corresponding hook to the size of the insect I'm trying to imitate and I would clamp that into my vice, which is just a contraption that holds the hook steady for you.

[gentle guitar music] Once the hook is in the vice, I would grab thread.

Typically, I would match the thread color to the insect color.

So, I'd start my thread down the shank of the fly, which is the top part of the hook.

I would start by then stacking the materials, creating a tail and then say, like the thorax of the bug.

And if it's a subsurface fly, if it's what we call a nymph, I would put some type of weight on it.

If it's a dry fly or a fly that sits on the surface of the water, I would typically use some type of like a deer hair or something that has some floatability to it and then finishing with the head of the fly.

[gentle guitar music] Typically, what we would do on a normal day when we come down to the river, is we would take a small knit meshed net and we would siphon the water and that would show us, what's actually present in the water and then our flies would correspond to the size and shape of whatever insect is predominantly in the water.

[lighthearted guitar music] When your time flies, one of the best feelings that you can get is to tie just a fly and then catch a fish on it.

It's seriously so cool, you feel like you're sustainable.

Like, you know, the Zombie Apocalypse could come by and you'd be fine.

You can catch fish and that is even amplified when it's a fly pattern that you create of your own.

So, you go out and you see a bug and you start throwing materials together and then you take that out and it works.

That's one of the coolest feelings for fly fishing and fly tying.

[guitar music] Woo-hoo!

It's something that you can truly master.

It's something that you can really dive into deep detail of the certain bug, the certain time of year, the certain hatch and you really feel like you can almost predict where the fish are gonna be, what they're gonna eat, when they're going to eat.

[guitar music] I think fly fishermen tying their own flies, is a trend that we see growing.

It's something that more and more people are getting into, because there are certain aspects to tying flies, especially the weight of the fly or like the silhouette of the fly that when you buy it commercially, may not be appropriate for what we use on the Truckee river.

[guitar music] When you're looking for materials to tie with, your local fly shop is your best bet to find those materials, because the nice thing about having a local fly shop, is you have the local knowledge of the river.

So, you have the materials that best suit the Truckee river pyramid lake and all of our surrounding area fisheries.

[guitar music] The culture of fly fishermen is dynamic.

It ranges from the guy who will show you a spot, tell you everything, what fly, to the guy, who's a little more guarded.

He's not gonna tell you, where he was fishing, what spot he had, but more often than not, fly fishermen are very open and willing to share where they were, what fly they were using, what they were catching.

One thing that's really nice about the community that we have here in Reno, is that it's a very fun atmosphere.

A lot of people are just here to have a good time, be outside, encounter some of the amazing fish that we have on the Truckee river.

So, it really is like a family.

You know, you really do have a lot in common with people through fly fishing, through the community.

[guitar music] - Go to renoflyshop.com to find out more .

That wraps it up for this edition of WLIW Arts Beat.

We'd like to hear what you think, so like us on Facebook, join the conversation on Twitter and visit our webpage for features and to watch episodes of the show.

We hope to see you next time.

I'm Diane Masciale, thank you for watching WLIW Arts Beat.

[jazzy music] Funding for WLIW Arts Beat was made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

[jazzy music]