 about Aunt Len and what she had created for the children of Harlem. Our culture values neither the historical importance of doll play nor the home and creative at home work of women in color as activities worthy of humanist scholarship. But what Aunt Len put into collecting, researching and contextualizing her dolls was scholarship. It still is scholarship. We call on each of you tonight to help Alva and Paulette resuscitate Aunt Len's vital and indispensable life's work. It's an imperative for the greater common good. It's an exquisite pleasure and a privilege to have worked the past year with artist Alva Rogers and scholar Dr. Paulette Richards, who trained as an academic researcher and teacher. Dr. Richards has been a Fulbright scholar in Senegal, a New York City public library fellow and received a 2021 Doris Duke Foundation grant to pursue her work focused on bringing the history and culture of Africans in diaspora to the fore. Alva Rogers is an artist and dramatist based in New York City. She's got three master's degrees, a Bessie, and has received grants from Rockefeller Foundation and the Jim Henson Foundation, among others. 2023 is going to be big for Alva. Julian Roman, her most recent play will be produced at the Tank Theater in NYC and an adaptation of her the doll plays will be presented at Franklin Furnace's sister organization, Dixon Place. Not only that, Alva Rogers will be soloing at MoMA in February. She's here with us now. So tootsweet, I'm out of here. And you have Dr. Paulette Richards and Alva Rogers. Thank you. So I think I was supposed to start by indicating how it was that I met Alva. I was co curator with Dr. John Bell at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut on an exhibit called Living Objects African American Puppetry. Alva heard about this exhibit and she thought about submitting some of her puppets or other work. But because she's always been an avant-garde playwright, she wasn't sure whether her work fit into the rubric of puppet. We tend in the puppet world to draw a line between dolls and puppets, but I am a doll person. And so I've been troubling that line since I got involved in puppetry. And so I was really happy to encounter Alva's work and invited her to submit a script for inclusion in the exhibit catalog since I wanted to showcase plays or performing objects that were written by African American artists. I subsequently received a grant from Heather Henson to develop a critical analysis of Alva's work. Alva's plays have consistently pushed the boundaries of mimetic representation by mixing live actors and puppet and doll characters. And so mymesis or how art represents life and what is reality and through whose eyes is going to be one of the themes of our talk today. So Alva, are we starting the slide presentation or do you want me to go on mymesis now? Because before there was a slide that had it further down in the deck. All right. If you'd like to continue with mymesis a little bit, we can do that. Okay. All right. So as I said, mymesis refers to the way that art imitates life. A work of art can draw audiences into a vision of the world that is much darker than reality and the world that we live in now sometimes makes it seem like that would be hard to do. We call those kinds of worlds dystopias or it can invite them to participate in an enchanted landscape that does not follow the laws of physics. So a artist can create a world where everyone can magically fly and because we want to participate in that vision, we suspend disbelief. Dolls exist in what has been called the uncanny valley because they appear lifelike and yet we know they are not living beings. And so I remember going to a doll show and being freaked out by the reborn dolls. These are artists who create baby dolls that look so real that you get, wait a minute, that's the uncanny valley. So some people find dolls disturbing for that reason. And yet in many cultures around the world dolls function as ritual objects that enable devotees to engage with the world of spirit. In traditional African societies dolls could move fluidly between functioning as ritual objects or as play things. In the U.S. this capacity appeared threatening to slaveholders who regarded ritual dolls as heathen idols. There's something in the Ten Commandments about not venerating heathen idols and the Puritans with pretty stricke on it. So although the WPA narratives record many instances of formerly enslaved people describing dolls that they own, African Americans capacity to make the kind of figures that had served as ritual objects in Africa was restricted under slavery. So the masks that were part of large spectacle dramas and some of the figurative sculptures that would have been placed in temples or other sacred spaces that those were like, no, no, we can't have that here you're not making that. So African Americans capacity to make the kind of figures was restricted and alongside this grew up stereotypes about dolls like voodoo dolls that reflect a fear of black people, particularly black women using dolls to empower themselves. So tonight is a story about how Lennon Hoyt Holder used dolls to empower herself and her community. Whether a doll is believed to have spiritual power or not, the ability to present oneself and one's worldview in a figurative object is empowering. We're always talking these days about I want to see myself, I need to see myself. And for a long period of time, black children had limited opportunity to do that in their play because black dolls were not manufactured for them. African American doll collectors like Aunt Lennon have labored to open the vistas of imagination by presenting young minds with dolls that represent the whole human family. And later we'll be talking about the importance of Aunt Lennon's collection, including dolls of many different ethnic backgrounds, not just black dolls or just white dolls. Okay, Alva, are we ready to move into the slides? Yes, we are ready. Okay, here we go. Okay, I'd like to begin by just lighting a candle for Lennon Holder Hoyt. And I just wanted to have a moment of silence to honor her memory. Thank you. So now that she's in the room with us, let's continue. Next slide, please. Okay, I really want to just bring your attention to her educational background and her professional affiliations. Just to dispel any idea that you might consider that she was just a crazy woman who collected dolls. So she received her high school degree in 1930 from New York Teachers Training School. And I recently found out just a couple of days ago that that training school was in the same location as the high school that I went to on the City College campus. So she went to high school where the music and art was formed, conceived. And then she received her BS in Art and Education in 1937. She received an equivalent, she received a teaching certificate from in special education from Teachers College, Columbia, and the equivalent of a PhD from CUNY in 1959. Now she was on the advisory board of Harlem Hospital for about 10 years. And she was a member of St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Harlem. And members of, she had membership in various doll clubs, national doll clubs. And she was a member of the Fight Delta Campus Sorority. That was an educator's sorority for black women. And she ran the sorority, as you can see in 1953. That's what the term first basilis means. And may I have the next slide, please? So here we have Lennon Holder Hoyt in her, one of the main galleries in the museum. Next slide, please. So Lennon Hoyt, and she was affectionately known as Aunt Lenn, married Louis P. Hoyt, a pharmacist, in 1938. And they purchased the home on Hamilton Terrace. And this is her block. This was her block. And Hamilton Terrace, and for those of you who don't know much about New York City architecture or urban design, you know, cul-de-sacs and terraces and places, P. L., those are locations where you're going to have, well, they're kind of, they're insulated number one. So Hamilton Terrace is insulated between St. Nicholas Terrace and Convin Avenue. So then you had very gentry folks living on this Terrace block in Harlem. And you can, this is analogous to Sutton Place on the upper east side. Next slide, please. Now, what do Thurgood Marshall, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, W. E. B. Du Bois have in common with Lennon Holder Hoyt? Just think about that for a minute. Besides the color of their skin. Next slide, please. St. Phillips Episcopal Church, located at 215 133rd Street in Harlem. They were all parishioners at St. Phillips Episcopal Church. Next slide, please. Now, the Lafargue Clinic, which was the first mental health clinic in Harlem, was located in the parish basement. And it was founded in 1946 by psychiatrist Frederick Bertham, novelist Richard Wright, staff writer of Life Magazine Earl Brown, and Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop, rector of St. Phillips Episcopal Church. Now, I've come to find out that Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop was one of them. The main architects of Harlem and the social fabric in life for the well-being of black Americans in Harlem, he petitioned the city government for parks to be, you know, designed and built and added to Harlem, among other things. Really, so it's Linda Aiden. So its mission was to concentrate on the mental health of children as it was determined that discrimination and segregation induced mental disturbances in black children and adults. And now this is how we connect Thurgood Marshall. Data and doll tests from Lafargue recited in a court decision to integrate schools in Wilmington, Delaware, and later in Brown versus Board of Education, which ruled that separate black and white schools were unconstitutional. I just discovered this about Aunt Len and about this clinic a couple of days ago. Paulette and I were just, we just couldn't believe it. It's almost like it was in plain sight all these years, but we just decided to, oh, I said, oh, I'm not familiar with St. Phillips. Let's see if it still exists. And then they had a Wikipedia page, and then we found out about all the parishioners, and then we started connecting the dots. Aunt Len was a mental health worker way before she opened her museum. She was working using dolls and puppets in a healing capacity long before the museum had opened. Next slide, please. So here's Dr. Wortham and several children in a playroom therapy session. Next slide. This is Aunt Len. Next slide, please. Yes, so not only was she a mental health worker, she was an advocate, along with those other historical characters. And incidentally, you know, it made me think, wow, Richard Wright took his family to Paris. W. E. B. Du Bois took his family to Ghana, West Africa. Ralph Ellison became kind of very reclusive. He had so much anxiety, and regarding, I mean, racism had such an effect on him. If you've ever, if you haven't read Invisible Man, I urge you all to read it. And in fact, he was a patient of Dr. Wortham because he had his extreme anxiety was induced when he was asked to join the war as a soldier, and he did not want to join, in his words, the Jim Crow Army. So Richard Wright, who was also in psychotherapy, he made an arrangement for him to start seeing Dr. Wortham. So this was a serious business. Mental health was a serious business. And and it still is a serious business. Next slide, please. Paulette, before we move on, would you like to chime in on any of that section? Yes, I just want to underline that as we saw in Lenin Hoyt Holder's credentials, that she was an art teacher, and that she had a certificate in special education. And so now we have a a lead that needs to be researched further, because most likely she was using techniques of art therapy or play therapy with her students long before we started to call them those things. And so she had this insight that art and doll play or puppet play, because we know that she did make puppets. And use them with her classes as well. She had this insight that this could be beneficial for her students' development. So now we are going to just talk a little bit about Aunt Len's doll and toy museum in Harlem. And the doll plays. Next slide, please. So I absolutely adore this photograph. It's actually a postcard. It's one of two postcards that Aunt Len gave me during our last visit together. And this and as we get to the when we get to the next slide, you'll see that she this is carefully curated this table and these dolls around the table and the setting. And I decided when I was I carried these cards with me when I was at Brown, I decided that I would this would be a prototype of one of the scenes in the play. And this is called next slide, please. And the tea table ensemble. And so she describes the what the table is actually made of. And also, as you can see in the descriptions of the dolls, they're always referred to. You get to know the country that they're from, the company that made them. So the black doll is called the Black Steiner because there's that a German doll company called Steiner. And they made them some exquisite looking black dolls with beautiful eyes and porcelain bodies. And so this other one is a handwork. And so each doll has a toy and Aunt Len believe that like every doll in her collection had to be completely outfitted to be, you know, correct. And in this case, they also had to have a toy because they were going to a tea party. And so I'm coming back to the slide is so you can take a look at that again. Yeah, you see that the doll over here in the foreground, she's got a little bunny, there's a couple of the black doll has a bunny, they all have bunnies and and so forth. So a next slide, please. And I'm sorry. Yeah, we were going to emphasize here too that the black doll has at the table on a plane of equality with the other dolls. That's right. And there is I play with that also in that particular scene in the play. So and you see there's it there's the the address of the museum and her phone number. Next slide, please. So in this area, she had lots of baby dolls and they were all in buggies and all the buggies were antiques. And you can see there are lots of antique quilts and such and and bonnets and there's a there's a black baby doll in the foreground there. And as you can you can see this wooden thing her house was filled with you know the moldings. It was just an exquisite house with and which had a dumb waiter which still went from you know it worked. A next slide, please. Here we go. Baby dolls on parade and antique buggies. Black modern doll made in Germany. She accompanied me on my trip in 86. A black closed mouth baby doll. Two hilders. So these are all very notable rare dolls. All the dolls mentioned on this postcard. Next slide, please. So here is a reproduction. We took a photograph of the catalog the south of the sale catalog of her collection and the collection I mean the collection was sold on Friday December 16th 1994. Did you want to say anything here, Paulette? Yeah just to underscore that when we get to the inside of the catalog do we have some slides with that? We just have a couple. Okay yeah but the inside of the catalog is further documentation of aunt Len's work as a scholar. Yeah. As she was able to assemble the information on all of these dolls although she was part of a black elite and she and her husband had the means to purchase a nice home they were not wealthy per se so her ability to assemble this collection came down to her ability and her knowledge of which dolls had value so that when she went to flea markets and other places she often found overlooked treasures. Yes. She was able to identify exactly what the doll was rather than going to an antique dealer and buying them you know sold as antique dolls with a provenance. Yeah next slide please. So now we're going to look at we'll see the origin story of the doll plays. I think before we start this section of this of the presentation I would just like to tell you that there was a central image in the play that was based on an actual experience that I had with aunt Len during one of our last visits and I wasn't alone on this visit I was accompanied by a friend her name is Jennifer Good and Jennifer was the a co-owner with her brother of a club downtown called MLK and she was a collector herself paintings and such and she was very eager to meet Aunt Len. Now when we went this was during the time that before ATMs and so I'm just going to tell you that Jennifer happened to have her checkbook on her on this particular day so Aunt Len was always she's always very happy to take someone new through the collection and so while Jenny and I were there one of her pipes burst and Aunt Len she didn't have a checkbook or she didn't have cash on her she didn't have a way of paying the plumber that day and so but Jennifer put her at ease she was because she just was so upset that the water was going to get down to the down to the lower floors and and just destroy her collection and Jennifer was able to put her at ease and said don't worry just call the call the call the plumber and everything will be okay and so so that was that day that image stuck with me and so in the play the play begins with the we hear a trickle of water and you hear this little trickle of water throughout the play and by the end it becomes the flood um and I don't want to say too much about that because I'll tell you a little bit more about that later but but at the beginning of the play Aunt Len is dying and the dolls realize that she's leaving this world and they don't want her they don't want the outside world to take her and turn her to dust so they figured out that they've got to keep her in their world and in order to do that they have to turn her into a doll so throughout the course of the play we find out about how many of the dolls came to the museum how they be how they became a member of Aunt Len's family doll family and and how they make the magic to turn her into a doll by the end next slide please so uh as as uh Harley Spiller said earlier I decided that I would write um this as my graduate thesis and this was the invitation next slide please next slide please so I about a year ago I was able to find um the videotape from this graduate thesis reading at Brown and so I made some camera grabs with the video from the video and so this is actually the actor who played she was playing Aunt Len and this and my my the Brown production I was working with Heather Henson and Holly Laws great sculptor puppet builder amazing artist Heather Henson amazing artist puppet builder puppeteer and the three of us set out to build the look of this world and um so yeah Heather made this replica of her limestone out of a cardboard box next slide please okay this is Aunt Len and three members of the cast three of the dolls from the collection next slide please so here um you can see there's a little tee set on the ground we have um Paula would you like to talk about this scene sure um this is is it early and um what is the earliest the black character yes uh yes um the white girl is what's her name again well actually sitting next to early no this is actually the infinite diminution scene where they're on the train okay so then Izanah Walker is she's puppeteering and being the voice of the conductor and so Aunt Len and Brown Nurse Dollar on the train going to DC to a doll show and that it looks a lot similar to another scene because it's dark it's hard to see the characters with all the similar wigs but the conductor is actually a silhouette a puppet shadow puppet that was designed and made by Kara Walker and so were the black and white masks those are also made by Kara Walker next slide please oh well why why don't you give us the tee about how you pulled that off how did you get such a phenomenal artist as Kara Walker to contribute puppets to your show uh well um I actually I I have I have a friend who's here tonight her name from Toronto and her name is Deirdre Haskell and um she was living in Toronto with us I mean sorry she was living in Providence too um she's I was a mathematician and and we were all new mothers Deirdre myself and Kara Walker we were all new moms and I forgot exactly who introduced Kara and I because we had babies and we were we used to hang out with our kids and take them to places together and when I was working on the thesis I was telling her that I'm doing this and I would and she just was said oh that sounds fun I'd like to do that I can I have time to do that and that's that's how that happened and um yeah all in the timing so um that thesis production unbeknownst to me at the time there was a woman who she was a director of the New World Theatre her name was Roberta Uno who I think might be at the Ford Foundation or she was I don't know she's still there but she invited the me to bring the doll place to New World Theatre for a workshop production and you know we packed it up and we I mean this was amazing because they had money to give us a whole building crew to build a costumer who just built these amazing costumes and the sets and the Holly came and Heather came and we kept building and and we we loaded up the shadow walker shadow puppets and half the cast of who were actors brown brown university students who were actors and many of them were not acting students they had different majors but they they came so let's take a look at this incarnation of the doll place next slide please yeah so the New World Theatre at the University of Massachusetts is no longer in existence sadly sad but true and so we have Holly Laws in the back row she's standing next to Heather and and there's our cast and I have to say that this rendition this rendering of the show is my my favorite because we had all the lights that we needed we were able to make certain levels and I think you know Heather and Holly they just really they really got Heather made this incredible bible and I'm trying to remember the the term when you make a storyboarding um it was it was great we were exhausted we were just exhausted but it was great next slide please wait wait wait yes yes yes one thing to point out here um and then we can talk more about the set design in subsequent slides but on the the issue of Minesis one of the challenges that the show presents to the audience's imagination is that you have live actors playing dolls and then they manipulate dolls they animate dolls during the performance so we have the doll that's manipulating a doll puppet when you read the script flat it can be hard to visualize how that will work on stage but the audience response to the performances did show that people were willing and able to suspend disbelief yes yes enter into the world of the play okay let's go to the next slide thank you yeah so um you see we have the the baby dolls and there's a the the grace kelly doll and then there's a the nurse doll and there's a french fashion doll and the antebellum quartet dolls they were all rag dolls and they're up on the platform above and this uh version of the play that came to my attention see we were you know we're all because the cast has the play has a cast of 12 and i was trying in this case to do the show without having a separate actor portraying grace kelly doll and the antebellum misses and so so the the distinction was made by the grace kelly just putting on a black lace frock over her wedding gown and one of the comments that i received during this feet talk back after one of the performances was that was i trying to make a commentary on grace kelly was i suggesting that she was a racist and and i said oh no not at all not by any means at all i was just trying to um be more economical um so when the show was done the next times during the reading and in atlanta we hired us an actor a separate actor to play those roles one more thing to underline here because i i don't think we made this clear is that the character the doll characters in the play are modeled on dolls that were in aunt lent's collection yes and so the grace kelly doll was a doll that she displayed in her museum yes well i don't know if she had a grace kelly per se but she did have many celebrity dolls and they were molded um so i actually had like judy garland for instance and a bunch of whole other many many but i don't know she had grace kelly but i decided when one night i was at working on a paper and then i turned the tv on and i saw one of those e documentaries about grace kelly and and they interviewed a lot of her old friends from philadelphia and they all said basically how grace really wanted to go back to being an actress and she didn't necessarily like being a princess it was very isolating and so i thought then this would be just her life story encapsulated as a doll in a tower and with the prince stirring away all her hollywood clothes and he locked them in a trunk that's what that's what grace kelly says he and he locked them in a trunk and he says you may never wear those clothes again and so um i i thought that that worked very nicely actually and i'm pretty sure that if on land if there was a grace kelly doll she would have had one next slide so um the play was actually produced in atlanta at actors express theater in 2002 and here was my cast and uh yeah so here is where we can talk about um the success of the play in engaging the audience in the world of the play and particularly the underlying spiritual or ritual significance because in this location during the run of the show people began bringing dolls and leaving them as offerings in the foyer of the theater yes yes yes this is true and in fact you know i wasn't in atlanta for the entire run of the show but i was there for the opening of course and i went back for like the last few um for the last few shows and when i went for the last shows the there was a mound of dolls that almost reached the ceiling i i was just stunned it was it was unbelievable um yeah um and the the audiences were a mixed cast i mean mixed ages um mixed races and lots of doll people but just lots of people who just had stories to tell and were very they seemed to really jump on board i was grateful for that next slide please um so you can see that this production looks a lot different from the the university of massachusetts production and from um the um from the brown thesis of course this show the play was in repertory with another play by another playwright and so that when the show is in repertory it it often means that the two plays have to share the lighting plot they have to share um some of the set pieces that so you can't do too much to obstruct the set because there's a turnaround so my show ran for four days a week and then the next weekend the other show ran for four days so we had to have that turnaround so that there was a lot that i could not do in terms of the the staging the world the plasticity of the play and um so that's but let's talk about um now that we can see the bodies clearly here yeah that we can see that the actors had to adopt the attitudes of dolls and the movements of dolls yes well i had a lot with with with all the productions i was the doll bodywork instructor okay um and i used a book by brian what's brian's last name oh the the title of the book is doll face has a party and brian has since written like his books have become incredible movies directed by um wonderful directors i'm just i'm so sorry i'm drawing a blank on his last name and if someone can remember and i know that you know heather so put his last name in the chat for me thank you doll face has a party and brian sells nick brian sells nick thank you so much um and so doll face is a doll who wants to have a party and she invites all of her friends in the household and the friends are spoon and chair and fork and they make she she baked cake and so in the story we see how the doll and how she eats so she might take a piece of cake but then the cake gets smashed on the side of her face because she really can't open her mouth you know and when she folds her legs you know her feet are like all a skew i had her ankles they're not like this but they're like you know like her knees are kind of bent a skew like a like a like a rag doll would and so um we did all these exercises with the actors so that each actor i mean sorry each doll character her body movement is informed by the the material with which the doll is constructed so the baby dolls with the bonnets they are these um they're bisque dolls so they're made of porcelain and and bisque which is a type of porcelain and uh and they all have these like we put these sock like they look almost sort of like mittens on their hands so that the actors couldn't move their fingers to make them more doll like and um some of the doll some of the character some of the dolls had swivel heads see at the very beginning of the play there's a scene called the procession and each doll marches in and she they introduce themselves and they tell you what they're made of and they say oh and i have a swivel head and so some dolls can swivel and then army talking doll in particular and i have a i have a photograph of thomas edison's talking doll that aunt len had in her collection and the doll has a metal torso which we'll see later but in the description of army talking doll aunt len i created that aunt len gives her brown replacement skin and she gives her a blunt and wig and she's got an army helmet because she's watching out for us and she she knew she found her with replacement brown skin because she thought that maybe there was a black family who and this is in this is my this is my telling of this story um in the in the play aunt len thinks that a black black mother must have found this talking doll and gave it replacement brown skin so that she could give it to her brown child so yeah so let me have the the antebellum quartet and they're all ragdolls so they're kind of floppy so yeah that um the the the the materials are very instructive on their movement and and actions and their voices they all have kind of like pull string voices so the dialogue is all in verse yeah great we go to the next slide so here is french fashion doll and there's greece kelly doll next one so this reading came after the production in atlanta um i'm trying to remember um no actually i it may have come it may have it may have come first i i can't remember right now sorry you have you have an image of the performance right i have an image of not of the performance but of the act of the cast after the meeting yeah yeah next slide please oh so yeah so then it was this was before the atlanta production so yeah so peter de blas was the director um this cast was made up of a lot of julie art actors um the three women uh to my left were julie art actors and there's a yelly um and uh peter and tanya yeah and then in the in the other reading you have an even more illustrious cast member yes next slide classical theater of harlem and residents at the schomburg research library we had a staged reading there next slide please and aunt len was portrayed by american master carmen de lavalade this was such an honor and such an amazing treat um she was just the ideal aunt len um she really wanted to play this role she felt like it was in her she knew aunt len she understood it um sadly the show um there was a there are a couple there's one um person from the brown uh uh thesis um no from the new world theater production she was also in this uh reading and um yeah i what a a remarkable person and i i would bumped into her son a couple of times and he told me that she she she'd spoke about the play and the character so much to leo and that she really wanted to do it and i i think you all know that she's been um she has uh alzheimer's now so sadly that won't be able to happen but um i wanted to interject here that um carmen de lavalade and her husband jeffrey holder had a large collection of figurative objects that ran the gamut from african masks to mechanical figures to dolls so you were really speaking her language you know i didn't you didn't know that but um yeah that was uh i'll never forget it i'm so sorry i didn't it wasn't videotaped um next slide please so the serious business of doll playing so we did discuss a little so it's a serious business and so now paulette do you want to sort of introduce this next section and um uh and we are this is a sort of a this this slide is a pre pre lute to an introduction to a book which we have some images from by robin bernstein yes so just to underscore that that because dolls in our society have been associated mainly with girls had not received as much scholarly attention as other topics in the humanities i'll put it that way now we have girlhood studies and we have researchers looking at how dolls contribute to children's formation of identity but um we're signaling once again here that in an african context dolls had spiritual significance so i'm gonna um throw you a a curve ball and ask while on len was an upstanding member of this episcopalian church did you get a sense from her that she also found a spiritual presence or a spiritual meaning in the dolls which she collected oh most definitely um and you know an aunt len was a very spiritual person i she she she treated the dolls with like such reverence you know and especially the very the those old handmade dolls by the enslaved peoples you know and and whenever and some of those dolls were stolen at web at one point and some of them were returned and she's very happy when they were returned um and she i think that she knew that she was that they were they all embodied um history and uh i mean all objects do and um we i felt that i was in the presence of you know i i didn't want to leave i never wanted to i it was it's just an awe inspiring uh place uh to be um and uh and i i i really hope that everyone will leave here today just knowing you know what what an intelligent and wrote lively filled with you know and um caring compassionate human being she was next slide please so i had already said my spiel about my medic challenges so we can go to the next slide and maybe i can leave this in as um applied theory so this is the scene where aunt len is where the doll no this is what is this this is the scene where the doll collector comes for tea and it's this it's the first time or the second time he comes and he promised she tells him the only there's a caveat when you come to visit me you may never talk about buying any of my dolls we can have show and tell but you cannot talk about buying any of them and as the scene goes on he's trying slipping it in and every time he makes a mention of that all the dolls in the collection they start to whisper to her and tell her tell him to leave now mama len and then he starts to tell you know but what will happen to you what will happen to your collection when you're gone you're not going to live forever you will turn to dust so um by the end she's she's just had it with him and she stands up and she tells him to leave and the dolls do too so i think this is where we had three images from yes productions to contrast but they were left so this was your brown one and then the next slide please is what it looked like at the new world theater where the dolls in the back on the upper level are listening into the conversation and advising aunt len as he mentioned to get this guy out of the house and i think in we can in the context that you built around the play as we'll get into deeper when we get to the flood that him coming to visit aunt len and proposing a transaction a sale is almost like a slave trader coming to purchase people from a community which was greatly feared under slavery yeah so next slide please so that's what it looked like at actors express mm-hmm do we go to the next scene yes so everything is topsy turvy topsy turvy dolls and these are the this is what we're going to see we'll see topsy spanking her doll in uncle tom's cabin and all of my plays have an element of enchantment which i i attempt to achieve by having a puppet a doll or an object of some sort so let's go to the next slide please so in this case you're kind of undoing a the dark spell that was cast or woven under slavery some in the audience may not be familiar with the history of the topsy turvy dolls the doll is usually a cloth figure often handmade and on one side would be a white face and body and on the other side would be a black face and body and then the skirt covers the extra head so you can flip it over and play with one character or the other the historical record is thin on documentation so we don't know for sure there are stories that black children were prohibited from playing with dolls that represented which race it or it you know in different versions it's a different race but in any case to escape censure you could quickly flip the doll over and then everything looks hunky dory another um historical background on these dolls is they became popular again in the 1920s when there was a pair of sisters who had a very famous act playing topsy and eva and one sister would wear blackface as topsy and the other sister would play little eva and then there were dolls manufactured and mass marketed as topsy and eva yeah so um um so i just want to draw your your attention to the to the text underneath the the image so this is a raggedy and mammy topsy turvy doll by cotton country creations k k k so this was a white supremacist doll and toy company and they made these objects and toys as tools with which for which the young white children could learn how to treat black children black slaves cotton country creations next slide please yeah so i'll just read this in performance as topsy a black faced actress most slightly a white girl raises her hand to strike a black doll so this is this is how they learned this was this was taught this was a learned behavior from very young and they used dolls to teach next slide so i have this i i i introduced this in a series of scenes i call them i refer to these dolls because they're rag dolls as the antebellum quartet and um so there's hannah and there's early hannah is the slave mother and early is her daughter and there's the mrs and sarah is um early is a sign to take care of sarah as she combs her hair and so i sarah wants to know know what early dreams about and so there are two scenes that unfold and one of them but early doesn't want to share her dreams and she says you know i'm a slave girl and you know i don't dream i can't dream i'm just a slave and so but she says oh don't you have well don't you dream well too don't you want to dream of your children and she says i don't dream of children i'm just gonna be a slave and die and then she says oh come on you're my best friend all girls dream of children so then she makes her switch and she does this incantation to make her lose her sort of her awareness of where she is and who she is what skin she's in and she starts to reveal her dreams and then she says okay stop and then she brings her back and then they switch places again so then that happens again and the next time it doesn't have a happy ending um we go to the next slide yes you're on the next slide yeah so so those images are from racial innocence performing American childhood from slavery to civil rights by Robin Bernstein and i want to tell you that um Dr. Jennifer Brody who's in the audience she introduced me to this amazing book um she's a professor at Stanford and she includes the doll plays in her um syllabus and i went to speak there and she the class was reading this so i read the book before i i went there so i i'm just i can't i keep going back to it uh next slide please yeah let's let's move through that yes we're running out of time yeah so we're just gonna just you have the name of the book we're gonna move on next slide please yeah so here so then when i said when it when the same scene unfolds but differently um this is what happens to early uh early gets she's on the whipping post before her lynching and the misses she says she wants to whip but then she makes her mother whip her instead of whipping her herself and there's i think what we missed though in in this dark incantation and which oh yes we did miss that unravel it or unwork it is that this topsy turvy switching of places in that process early reveals that she is actually sarah's sarah's sister yes half sister yeah so that is what what drove the rage yeah and she describes her mother's rape as well in the dream and it's all it's all over then yeah so i think we're right at 715 so we just have a few slides left let's move to the next slide many thousands gone so this loops back into the flood that um what what uh how they did with the the plumbing incident in linds house is to imagine the flood as the middle passage and all through the play army talking doll shows up at different points and just announces numbers and at first the audience doesn't know why she has these numbers but they're continually increasing and in this scene it becomes clear that what she's counting is the number of people lost in the flood and in the far background you can see the mermaid shadow puppets that carol walker made that represent the people who fell or were tossed overboard from the slave ships and now live in the bottom of the ocean yeah so we go to the next slide that's the army talking doll so we put uh let me put a sort of a console that's attached to her and she has a microphone so everything all her um she's always amplified so yeah and the next slide oh so here there's a there's an army there's a there's a copy of um Edison's talking doll that's what the actual this was an on lens collection and these are a couple of dolls there were hundreds stunning but that's what a talking mechanical doll and it was also jointed yeah next slide can we do this really fast yeah we're gonna do this really fast yeah so as we as as we have been highlighting all along that um in traditional african perceptions dolls are ritual objects or can be ritual objects as well as play things and you have indicated that aunt Len did have a sense of spiritual presence or meaning about the dolls in her collection um and i think that's connected to the healing that she was trying to bring you know the healing to the psyches of children by opening the realm of imagination by giving them representations of themselves and just making it safe for them to play so next slide please so in the end as Allah has indicated the dolls realize that aunt Len is about to make the transition between the material world and the spirit world and so they turn her into a doll so that she will reside with them instead of turning to dust and then last slide yeah this is that ritual taking place in the the mass providence production know the amherst massachusetts okay and then the last slide and has literally become a doll next slide please so harley back to you thank you paulette wow thank you very much alva rogers for your work for your courage dr paulette richards for your brains and kindness and friendship with alva we you guys did a fabulous job there there are comments but there are not questions in the room because i think you covered a lot but i have one question and i hope it's appropriate alva alva rogers has many talents she teaches children and she has as you just witnessed a very gentle and empathetic touch and practical furnace is delighted that she works with us and every time i go to see her in action she doesn't stop teaching when the bell rings and the students are following her out the door they they don't let go and i don't want to let go of alva either but my my question you've been an you've been you're an actress and a playwright you have been in real serious plays and this is clearly a crucial part of your life and your work can you talk about your decision have you ever acted in the doll plays or can you talk about why you don't or wouldn't or couldn't or um well just quickly i i never wanted to but i it's a funny little story i had to when we did this show in amherst um we wanted to record it and so all the actors were there was one actor who was a an equity actor the woman who played on land was an equity actor and she didn't want to be photographed so i decided i i i know in order to get some images taken of the production i stepped in i got in costume and everything but i just had to um do the whole play with the script now she did take the photographs there but when we did the videotape which we can't find um i had to step in and do that um but i i really didn't want to um to act in it and i i know that i i just don't i just i it's not i don't i don't think it's my my forte i have a follow-up and it again i hope it's okay to ask but you you mentioned your daughter and i wonder with all this knowledge in your brain and your heart do you think watching her play with dolls as a child was she inculcated to your way of thinking was she any different than other kids you saw play with does she have a head start on all this or oh my gosh uh yes she she she would come to the all the rehearsals she memorized so many of those lines um yeah um i she would play with her dolls and create scenarios and and she loved her brown dolls and she had you know white dolls brown dolls but she you know she was um it was really joyful and uh yeah thank you can can we go a little bit more vulnerable here okay there is one really beautiful story about you and your daughter and the dolls um there was a period when the lack of affordable housing became a serious difficulty all were kind of couch surfing and in order to make sure that your daughter had was grounded in a sense of home made a like a shrine basically it was a doll in a suitcase right mm-hmm yeah and and so that you all had that as your home space yes yeah so we always traveled with our with our dolls i do see some questions over here i'm gonna um read a couple of them and please speak the one you want to answer um or all of them maybe i wonder if there is a sales record for the collection at Sotheby's that would tell who bought the dolls and if any parts of the collection are sealed together that is the first one i'm just gonna do two more um was Jeffrey Holder a relative for a chance of Aunt Len yes the black cameo is here so fabulous and one more has this important material been included in theater theater curriculum for high schools and undergrad graduate studies uh okay um Aunt Len and Jeffrey Holder were not related not not in that sense Jeffrey Holder was from the Caribbean Aunt Len is a African American you know she's a descendant of American black people um so the other question was um oh the has it been included in theater curriculum for high schools and undergraduates study hi carol wonderful question i and thank you Aunt Corrine for your question um carol the the short answer is no we do not have the doll place has not been published yet so um so no not yet and was there another question um i see um there was one more about uh who bought the collection and oh i see yeah yeah no i don't i don't know um i guess Sotheby's would have a record of that yeah anybody else with the last chance there's one more that just popped up uh no actually a couple of them will the show be produced again soon i don't know i don't know i i i you know i hope i definitely want the show to be produced in that version i i am working on a puppet version of it um so but it'll be different so yeah um but i would love to we want a production here in new york it's a it's a very unique new york story it needs to be told here and maybe one day um a producer will be brave enough to take it on uh there's also one question about where and when is the production on broadway soon i'll let i'll let harley take answer that but like not not soon enough i would i'd be heading over to the lund fontaine right now if we could i would all of you should come someday but we really hope that will happen this is the end of our serious play tonight um so i want to thank everybody for coming and bye dear dr Lisa Liz Debbie Stephanie Jones aunt jessie adrian corine thank you thank you all thank you it was a wonderful evening thank you oh you're welcome thank you for coming everyone susan thank you for coming lori lori you're in fez robert robert where are you robert he's still here i am fan girl thank you for coming thank you debora thank you brena uh thank you mark so yeah so um i hope everyone will have a lovely and healthy holiday season thank you as we said this evening has been recorded you will find it at franklin furnace dot org in just about a week and we invite you to sign up for our mailing list for once a week emails with events not like this there's nothing like this but we work with a lot of gutsy artists and scholars and we wish to keep you in our midst so thank you for coming out and alba and paulette you're the best you you really did it thank you thank you have a good night and let me take one one one last uh screenshot of everyone if you could please smile i want to post this tomorrow thank you so much for being here have a good night good night