Calgary actor Norma Lewis shines as Harlem Renaissance sculptor Selma Burke.

Who will be the statue?

This is one of the questions asked Selma BurkeAn imaginative, new drama from Calgary playwrights Caroline Russell-King and Maria Crooks, a world premiere co-produced by Theater Calgary and Alberta Theater Projects.

Burke was a black American sculptor born in 1900 who came of age during the Harlem Renaissance, married to poet Claude McKay.

He was Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King Jr. and Booker T. He was able to build a thriving career that included sculptors like Washington, but also ordinary Americans and a few wealthy white patrons.

His growing fame led him to sketch American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the drawings that became the source of Roosevelt's image on American coins.

However, Burke has never been credited with creating this image and has long been lost to history – as have many black women who don't fit comfortably into the narrative of western civilization's success stories. The segregated United States of America in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s.

(l to r) Christopher Clare, Norma Lewis, Heather Pattengale in Selma Burke, world premiere presented by Theater Calgary and Alberta Theater Projects. Photo: Trudy Lee.

ROOTED IN PLACE AND TIME

Calgary actor Norma Lewis, who grew up in Edson, Alberta and Calgary, gives Burke a voice and presence that is at once grounded in place and time.

Lewis has an engaging deep, booming voice, and as the young Selma, she's determined to pursue a career as a mischievous artist, but that seems impossible for someone like her at this particular moment in US history.

Selma doesn't miss a beat when she learns that the great French sculptor Henri Matisse only accepts the occasional student, but the very talented.

“He'll pick me up,” he says, and you say, “Comment?” By the way. he learns to find his signature style in Matisse's Paris studio.

DOMESTIC TRAVEL

The challenge with exploring an artist's journey is that so much of it depends on what's going on inside of you, and when it comes to conveying that to an audience, it can be a daunting challenge.

Russell-King and Crooks pull it off in a wonderfully theatrical way: the sculptures come to life and interact with Selma as you create them.

The statues are represented by Christopher Hunt, Heather Pattengale and Christopher Clare, who represent 17 living characters, including FDR, J.K. Edgar Hoover, MLK, new mother of stillborn child, Eleanor Roosevelt, turkey, alternates playing with inanimate objects. Selma's second husband (Claire) and Selma's third husband (Hunt).

Hunt (no relation) does a masterful job of jumping from FDR to J. Edgar Hoover, and he puts it into a montage of living artists from the early 20th century.^th A century in which everyone from Rodin to Pablo Picasso, Manet, Monet, Modigliani, and more were, not coincidentally, white men, suggesting that Selma may have encountered systematic opposition on her way to artistic fame.

Claire's Claude McKay is a complicated, flawed, alcoholic poet who can't stand up to Selma's power or will, and is easily swayed to become Duke Ellington and later MLK.

Pattengale is wonderful, whether playing a statue or a heartbroken new mother holding her stillborn baby.

ECONOMY AND ENERGY

All of this is directed with economy and energy by Delicia Turner Sonnenberg, who finds the humor in Selma's journey and finds a way to turbo-charge the episodic script beyond what the story line intended.

But it does look Selma Burke open, Forrest gump– like, the wonderful woman is so in control of her creative life: Selma discovers that no matter who she creates, some people are not satisfied.

In his charming, relentless and positive manner, he defied naysayers like Russell-King and Crookes for the right to continue giving form in wood, clay and bronze to the works of art that define his historical moment. done by digging into history and sharing Burke's story.

Why an American sculptor? Russell-King also wrote a wonderful drama about the famous five High and great heroismit explores the history of Nellie McClung and the Alberta suffragette movement in the early 20th century, it has something in common with Selma Burke, and the famous five became a beautiful statue in Olympic Plaza.

Russell-King said: “I love to write about the stories of strong, hidden women.”

Created by Russell-King and Maria Crooks Selma Burke is an inspiring, imaginative study of an extraordinary woman's 20s.^th century life.