Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100.5 FM in the Lower Mainland.
Speaker: On the podcast today, Lorraine Chisholm talks with Caroline Russell King about the play and book Selma Burke, Carving a Sculptor's Life. African-American sculptor Selma Burke chronicled many of the extraordinary and devastating events of the past century in her art.
Speaker: Lynchings, the Harlem Renaissance, the Holocaust, and the assassination of Martin Luther King. Dr. Selma Hortense Burke lived from 1900 1995.
Speaker: Two playwrights based in Calgary have created an award-winning play based on her life. The play's manuscript is now a book, Selma Burke, Carving a Sculptor's Life.
Speaker: Caroline Russell-King co-wrote the play with Maria Crooks, and I'm pleased that Caroline is here with me now. Hello, Caroline. Hi, Lorraine. Thanks for having me Great to be talking to you. You started out thinking you would write a play about the European painter Piet Mondrian. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: How did you come to write a play about Selma Burke instead? Well, you know, I i love Mondrianne and I always had it on my bucket list that I wanted to write a play about a visual artist. And that seemed like ah a natural thing to write about something that you love. I started the initial research and then I thought, oh, who who really wants another play about a white European artist? I don't think we I don't think we have enough other plays. And so I started looking around and I discovered the work of Selma Burke and I honestly fell in love with it. It was a visceral response. And and I knew that I needed someone to co-write with and that's how I ended up writing with Maria Crooks.
Speaker: Now, you say that Burt persisted in art making in the face of a society that didn't always recognize her talents. And I confess to you off air that I hadn't heard of her, even though I majored in sculpture in art school. Yeah, it's sad. Tell us a bit about who she was and the life that she forged.
Speaker: Well, she lived almost an entire century and she had an incredible life. She created sculpture from the time she was a little kid living in poverty on the clay from the riverbank and made little sculptures. And that's how she first started out.
Speaker: Her family wasn't really supportive. They want her to be a doctor and sort of pushed her into medicine. But she left medicine and returned to her art, which was fantastic. There's a lot that's from her real life that we don't have in the play. I would encourage anybody who's remotely interested to jump in and find out all about her life. But we take it from the time that she starts modeling for an art school in order to support herself so that she can afford her materials.
Speaker: And there she meets another artist and fell in love with Claude McKay, who did have a life as ah as a writer and was published and as incredible poet.
Speaker: And there is a history around him and they married and divorced and got together least two times that we could find out in our research. But he has a legacy and he barely mentions her in his life, but ah she was forgotten and sort of swept under the rug in a lot of ways.
Speaker: One of the intriguing aspects of the play you create is that the actors portray all the art. yes How and why did you do that? Well, we didn't want to write a biopic. You know, were we're not here to educate people. We wanted to entertain people. And what theatre does really, really well is theatre. So we wanted to make something theatrical.
Speaker: And we didn't want to have a slideshow. We didn't want to have a show and tell. and we didn't want to do that. So we we came up with the idea that she, in her mind, communicates with her art and has conversations with the different pieces that she's making.
Speaker: So, when she's sculpting a bust, we had an actor whose head would come out of a piece of furniture and there would be ah a live head there and then the head would talk to her. We had other pieces of sculpture that she carved, that she molded on stage in the Atelier in France when she's talking to Matisse and she's learning how to sculpt. That's all on a real quote-unquote person.
Speaker: And this just made it really fun. We had at one point three busts that pop out of the stage at one time and all start talking which is sort of a cacophony of voices in her head that she can hear which dramatizes what's going on inside her because as as you know in prose you can get inside a character's head but in stage the only way you can do that is through the old-fashioned soliloquy and that's kind of had its day and gone so we created this conceit and it worked really really well and people were delighted with it
Speaker: Now, the play wasn't a one-off, but went through several stages of development. Can you talk about that process and and what impact it had on the play, how it was shaped and reshaped?
Speaker: So I'm also a professional dramaturg, so I had to take off my dramaturg hat to write the play and then put it back on at different times so that I could look at it through it a different lens.
Speaker: Maria and I created a whole bunch of scenes together. ah we created scenes independently. we tried to figure out what the, you know, exposition and setting us and rising action, climax, denouement, what that sort of structure was going to look like.
Speaker: And we tried several drafts, several ways. i had recipe cards all over my fireplace. We moved stuff around all the time. It was really ah fun. We'd find out something out about her life and we'd go, oh, we have to put this in. And then we realized that the play was going to be five years long. So we had to judicially edit and figure out where the lowest points in her life were and where the highest points were in her life so that we could focus on the maximum amount of conflict. Because as you know, in theater, theater and drama is all about conflict, person versus person. person versus themself, person versus their environment. So every scene had some real richness to it.
Speaker: It's incredible to think of an artist, a black woman working in that time and the difficulties she faced. So you were talking about conflict on the stage. What are some of the conflicts that you explore from Selma's life and career?
Speaker: Well, of conflicts with her husband who destroyed her art because he was trying to school her on how how she should make her art. And he tried, i think, very much to get her to move in one direction. And that's not the direction that she necessarily wanted to move in. She famously or infamously won a contest and she was invited to the White House and she did a live sitting. but She made um a sculpture of the then President Roosevelt.
Speaker: Selma was commissioned to make this plaque of the President. And then after the President died, the government decided that they wanted to issue, reissue the dime with his face on it.
Speaker: And the artist who worked for the government in that department, we think for the most part, copied, literally just copied her art and stuck it on the dime. And so the first time that she saw the dime, she was completely taken aback because that was her art.
Speaker: And it had been plagiarized and she wasn't able to get recognition for that at its at its time. Caroline, tell us about the scene where Selma sees a dime with that portrait on it and how it intersects with the wider history of the moment that you represent in the play.
Speaker: Well, it just goes to show that no women were doing the kind of work that she was doing, much less at the level that she was doing. And nobody was banging down her door and asking her to to do work. She was up against extraordinary odds, both as a woman and as an African-American sculptor.
Speaker: And she was able to... just keep going. She just decided that she wanted to honor her community. And so she got busts of a famous African-American entertainers and people who who could afford to pay her, could afford to commission her.
Speaker: But that was all the work she could get. When she did African-American artists, The white people thought that, you know, that's all she could do. And so she really had to make some inroads to convince people that that she was capable of doing, you know, a face is a face is a face, that she could do any work at any level and in and pretty much any medium. She worked in wood and bronze and stone. Oh, she was amazing with stone. She fantastic.
Speaker: Do you have a favorite scene? Oh gosh, do I have a favorite scene? Yes, I do. it's it it sounds conceited to say that every single night when I watch the play and Selma creates...
Speaker: Dr. Martin Luther King and brings him to life because she did create this a big sculpture of him close to the end of her life. And when she forms him on the stage and he appears to her, and then of course they talk where he forgives her because she feels guilty that she hasn't done enough political work during that time.
Speaker: And he says, you have done political work, you represented our people. And so she has some sort of self forgiveness. But that moment when she first makes him. Oh, and then they hug. in It was just beautiful.
Speaker: That was my favorite moment. Amazing. You describe the play as a flight of fancy. What do you mean by that? Well, as playwrights, you have to give yourself permission. We had to give ourselves permission in order to be able to dramatize the things that around what actually happened. So obviously there was no video, there's no record, there's no of a actual dialogue. So it's about making things free and having a flight of fancy so that you can string things together in a way that still has integrity. and still honors that person and is still true to the things that happened in their life. But, you know, we can, we don't, we don't know. It's funny, one of the actors so in one of the readings, she's with Matisse in Paris, in the Atelier, and he says, um she says something, he says, Oh, did she actually say that? And I said, I don't know, i wasn't there.
Speaker: So that's that's what it is. it's um it's It's about freedom. What are your hopes for how the play and the book might move and challenge an audience?
Speaker: I want them to be delighted with it. I want them to ah have an extraordinary moving experience. there are There's incredible humor in in it, and so there's lots of laughs, but at the end, there's there are tears as well, not because it's sad, but because it's joyous. And joyous tears are really hard to get out of an audience. It was lovely to go into the house afterwards and see people come out sniffing and with Kleenexes and talking and being really energized by it. So I think that
Speaker: People thought that the focus was going to be on maybe oppression and the focus is on joy. It was great to read the book and I really hope I get to see the play someday.
Speaker: Me too Thank you so much, Caroline. Okay. Thank you, Lorraine. I've been speaking with Caroline Russell King, who co-wrote the play and book we've been talking about with Maria Crooks. Selma Burke, Carving a Sculptor's Life is published by Talon Books.
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Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. Thanks for listening.
