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The Harlem Doll Palace highlights the work of Lenon Holder Hoyte, founder of Aunt Len’s Doll and Toy Museum. In this panel discussion livestreamed from the lobby of HERE Arts Center, Alva Rogers, playwright and lead performer in the show; Annalisa Dias, HERE co-director; Ashley Winkfield, director; and Dr. Paulette Richards, author of Object Performance in the Black Atlantic: The United States; reflect on why doll play was serious business for Aunt Len.
Panelists provide an overview of Holder Hoyte’s association with the La Fargue clinic, which offered mental health services to Harlem residents from 1946—1959. Then they discuss the evolution of the show which has included live actors playing dolls, dolls manipulated as puppets, and puppets constructed to represent dolls, considering the dramaturgical objectives and consequences of these choices.
This examination of the line between dolls and puppets further echoes Robin Bernstein’s assertion that dolls trouble the boundary between person and thing. Bernstein associates Black dolls with “the terror at the ontological core of slavery” since the slaveholding system tried to define one class of humans as things. Thus, the panelists conclude with reflections on how The Harlem Doll Palace uses dolls to work the powerful sympathetic magic of figuring Black people as empowered human beings.
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