Rankine, who work has examined everyday racism in America, and Wolfe, whose work addresses issues of the American worker, were both named MacArthur Foundation fellows; as the Fall TV season launches, we visit with producer Betsy Beers at Shondaland, one of the most successful companies in the industry.
Poet Claudia Rankine named a MacArthur 'genius grant' honoree
UPDATE: The 2016 class of MacArthur Foundation Fellowship honorees has been announced. Among them was poet Claudia Rankine. We were fortunate to have had her on The Frame last year and so today we re-visited that interview. What follows is the original post and transcript.
Poet Claudia Rankine’s book “Citizen: An American Lyric” is a provocative meditation on race in America.
Through a series of vignettes, Rankine tells the stories of everyday racism that people of color face on a daily basis. The poems are largely based on actual incidents of passive bigotry and prejudice that Rankine and her friends have personally experienced.
"I think the life of all people of color is one where those stories are lived through and warehoused in the mind and in the body. So I don't think I was consciously, over the years, stacking them up until I started stacking them up," said Rankine on The Frame. "I began by asking friends to just share with me a moment when they were trying to get through some ordinary day and racism stepped in. Often people would say I don't remember, and then I would get a phone call a few days later saying there was this and there was this."
Rankine stopped by The Frame in August 2015 when the play adaptation of “Citizen: An American Lyric” was coming to the stage. She talked about collecting the stories in her book, how the shooting of black people by police has come to the fore in society thanks to cellphones, and the significance of the hooded sweatshirt in a post-Trayvon Martin era.
Interview Highlights:
In addition to being a poet, you're also a journalist and a political commentator. Since your book pulls from real life, is poetry the best description of your work?
I do think poetry describes my work in the sense that, for me, poetry is the one place that feelings have total legitimacy. So whether I'm writing for newspapers or magazines or for myself, I'm always interested in affect — I'm interested in the emotional realm of whatever it is I'm looking at. I think poetry holds that. That's where feelings rock. (Laughs)
Some of the incidents in your book include somebody trying to use a cell phone in front of a house and being mistaken for an intruder. It's often being mistaken for somebody or confused for somebody. Somebody showing up for a therapy session and being mistaken for an intruder. These are incidents that happened to friends of yours on a regular basis?
Nothing in the book was made up. Not a single thing. Since we're talking about language I'm going to say it's not mistaken, I'm going to say projected on. So that black people walking around and the white imagination is in play and we walk into a projection of white fantasies of what black bodies are doing. And then have to bear the brunt of that.
There's a line in the play, "Because white men can't police their imagination, black men are dying."
That line was supposed to be the beginning of a piece that I thought would be a longer piece. Everything I wrote just came back to the same line, and so eventually I just said, this is it. It's as simple as that. Sometimes people will say to me, well, some of the police that are killing black men are black, but I still think those black men are working under a white structure, a white imagination that they, themselves, want to fit into.
You were writing this book at the time that Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman. Toward the end of the play there's a crawl of names: Michael Brown, Eric Garner. But it would be easy for this production to update that crawl with names like Sandra Brown. In terms of the topicality and timeliness of the production, how does it strike you that you can constantly update and expand the deaths that you are reporting.
I think it speaks to the fact that the books is untimely, it speaks to a continuum that's been going on for hundreds of years. I actually think that cell phones are what has brought the information to the forefront of our gaze as a society. Up until now these things were happening and everyone was moving along passively with the belief that there must have been more to it. That it couldn't be that the police were just gunning down unarmed black men. There must be something more complicated going on. Then we started seeing the footage and hearing the dialogue and understanding, no, this is how it's working. It's no different from the 1800s or the 1900s or Jim Crow, it's just a continuum.
Your poetry and the play suggest conversations that should have happened, but didn't. At what point do you hope your book of poetry and to a greater extent the play engages audiences in conversation about how they should react to what they're witnessing and reading on stage?
That's a great question, because, for me, I think the book is about intimacy and it's about the kind of intimacy that shuts down because of the unsaid. And often people, when they approach these racist moments, they don't know what the next thing to say is, or one can't engage it because it feels like it will be too big, it will be too volatile, it will be a place where you can't come back from. I'm hoping that the book and the play allows people to recognize these moments as moments that we all own. That they're not moments of private shame, they're moments of an American history. We can enter them, discuss them and move forward. As long as we keep acting like they're not happening, they'll keep happening.
Julia Wolfe goes underground for 'Anthracite Fields'
Julia Wolfe is the composer of "Anthracite Fields," an hour-long oratorio about Pennsylvania coal miners at the turn of the 20th century. The work, which took home the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for music, blends music with anthropological studies to create a poetic history — both of the miners' way of life and their broader impact on the world.
After Wolfe was commissioned by the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, she took a full year simply to research the piece. She traveled to coal mining towns to pore over historical documents and to conduct interviews with retired miners and their children. During the interviews she "made a very clear effort" to communicate that she also came from a small town in Pennsylvania. As Wolfe told The Frame:
I did not want to be this city slicker. And in the end we felt this connection. There was a beautiful moment when two of the people I interviewed came to Philadelphia to hear the premiere. They were very moved by it. They understood what I was doing and it was very gratifying to know that it spoke to them. There was some sense they had that this was remembering a life they had lived, and that was important to them.
Each movement of "Anthracite Fields" examines a different aspect of the miners' stories — from fatal accidents, to child laborers known as "breaker boys," to the modern-day commodities that rely on coal power but which the average American might take for granted.
Along with addressing historical and social issues, Wolfe was also wanted to create a type of sonic painting of the mines. She began her conversation with The Frame's John Horn by explaining this process.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
In a certain sense I think what I aim to do is capture the sound that represents something visual — being very deep down in the ground in complete darkness. Actually, on some of the tours, the tour guides would say: "Do you want to see how dark it can really be?" And they'd turn off the exit lights and it's completely dark.
Well, what does that image sound like to me? The double bass is playing the lowest open string, which is an amazing, rich, reedy sound. And Mark Stewart on the electric guitar is using a kitchen whisk. He takes the handle and he's actually scrubbing the electric guitar, also in a low register, with a lot of reverb. So you get this really wooly kind of sound. You get this sense of depth and resonance.
You're in a deep, dark place.
You're in a deep, dark place, sonically and visually.
Somebody might go to Tiffany's to look at a diamond, but you go to the diamond mine. You look at the human price that is paid for creating that product, and you do that by looking at oral histories, texts, coal advertisements. You become almost an anthropologist of what coal miners went through.
Yeah, and I'm really interested in these kinds of histories. I went to college thinking I was going to study social sciences. I took classes on American labor history. Accidentally I wound up in a music class and that was it. But it's a kind of return to this interest I've always had. And I'm particularly interested in looking at history through other lenses than, say, the mainstream textbook.
You're making an argument not to attend music conservatory, to actually get a broad liberal arts education. Because the things that you studied ended up being hugely influential in the compositions that you wrote.
Well oddly enough, yeah. And I think that because of my early interests in labor history, but also early creative work with texts and writing — writing with words — I certainly think extra-musically. That exposure to interesting thinkers and interesting courses was a great experience. It's in the music. I think everything that an artist does or lives comes into the music, whether it's perceivable or not. It's part of the creative process.
I want to talk about the text of "Anthracite Fields." In the first movement, the chorus recites a list of names that were casualties in a mining accident. It sounds like a requiem and a piece of journalism. You've gone back to find out who these people were and what happened to them. Do all of these things shape the approach that you have in writing what is clearly a nontraditional libretto?
Yes! They do. It was really fascinating to come across this list of names, the Pennsylvania Index of Mining Accidents. I thought, Oh my God, it's so long. I couldn't possibly list all the names. So I started to whittle it down to the [victims named John] with one-syllable last names. And later in the piece you can very clearly hear the ethnicity in the names. When I coached the choirs in singing it, I said, "It's a list of names, it's just a list. But it's someone's father, someone's brother, someone's uncle." So there's a kind of passionate, emphatic quality to the way I've thought about it.
"Anthracite Fields" isn't the first time you've written about labor history. Your 2010 piece, "Steel Hammer," is about the folk legend of John Henry, who was a steel driver for the railroads. Building railroads and mining for coal seem a world away from composing music. I'm wondering if you relate to these themes politically, or maybe in a more spiritual way — that what people are doing is joining a collaborative effort to create something, and a lot of music composition and performance is about that, too.
Oh, absolutely. And also, in a certain sense, work is work. I think I have a quite luxurious existence because I'm not underground. But that said, we're all laborers, and it was really fascinating to connect to the people in this anthracite coal region. I made a very clear effort to let them know I'm from this small town in Pennsylvania, even though I'm a New Yorker!
I also wonder if you've thought about how it can function as a piece of advocacy. Do you think an oratorio like yours can be an agent of awareness or political change?
I do. And this is a very interesting subject because it's complex. I think one of the things I wanted to reveal or focus on is that it's not so black-and-white. There are very clear issues that are important to me, like child labor, or even compensation for any labor. At the same time, we are a part of this conversation. I wanted to make it so that it's not just a little history about those people over there. It's actually all of us who live in comfort and use energy. In the end I felt like I had to look at that as well, just by the last movement — again, it's another list. But it's a list of all the things that we do every day that use energy.
"Anthracite Fields" will receive a one-night-only performance by the Bang on a Can All-Stars and Los Angeles Master Chorale on March 6 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
ShondaLand partner Betsy Beers was raised by TV
ShondaLand is the production company behind ABC's top-rated dramas and, though it's named for producer Shonda Rhimes, it’s hardly a one-woman show. As long as Rhimes has been making television, she’s had Betsy Beers as her producing partner.
Beers serves as executive producer for all ShondaLand shows and is as important to the operation as Rhimes. The two developed the hit show "Grey’s Anatomy" more than a decade ago, and they’ve been churning out popular ABC dramas ever since.
The Frame's host, John Horn, recently interviewed Beers at the ShondaLand offices in Hollywood.
To hear the full conversation, click the play button at the top of the page.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
On being a woman-dominated studio:
We do have a large predominance of women here at ShondaLand and, I have to say, on a regular basis we'll have a writer come in with whom we might be developing something, or a director, and there will be this moment where they'll sit in the room and look around and they'll say, You know, I've been doing this for a number of years and this is the first time I've ever been in a room and it was all women, or it was a majority of women. I don't notice it. I think it's just sort of second nature to have a diverse group of incredibly interesting, talented people here.
On her former life as a movie producer:
I could figure out a way to tank a film by working on it. I was like the Typhoid Mary of movies. And I loved movies, I think movies are spectacular. I had no ill will towards movies. I didn't have a secret plan to destroy the movie industry, but I did have an uncanny knack to work on things that I believed in and loved, and somehow or other that opening weekend, they just didn't fare very well. So I think the movie industry sighed a sigh of relief when I moved into the fine field of television.
On a lifelong love of television:
I was a television fan from [childhood]. I was somewhat raised by television. It was the third parent in the house, and I think that was probably true for a lot of people. But I loved it. I memorized the TV Guide fall preview schedule when I was seven and I would know exactly what night things were on ... Even while I was working in the movie business, I would be secretly watching television like I was cheating on my job.
On diversity in Hollywood:
The largest selling point I can give to people is, Your stories will get better. The interesting things that come up from people that have different experiences, different backgrounds, different sensibilities than you — every single thing about the creative process becomes better because you learn something, because the world expands, because you see something from a different point of view. So I just think it boils down to, Do yourself a favor.
Season premieres from the ShondaLand shows, "Grey's Anatomy" and "How to Get Away With Murder," will air on ABC, Sept. 22 at 8pm and 10pm PT.