What began as a facilitated conversation at a bakery was then adapted for the stage and is now a documentary. It's called “Makin Cake." The film explores power, equity, race and class, all told through the history of cake.
It’s the work of Milwaukeean Dasha Kelly.
Makin’ Cake was originally commissioned by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan to engage the community in conversations about race.
The stage production is still on tour, but the Milwaukee community can experience “Makin’ Cake” as a documentary when it debuts at the Milwaukee Film Festival. There is a showing on Sunday, April 26 at 1 p.m. at the Oriental Theater.
Ahead of its premiere, WUWM Race & Ethnicity Reporter Teran Powell spoke with Dasha Kelly about the project.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Teran Powell: As the race and ethnicity reporter, [I] examine how race intersects with everything, everywhere. With you examining this with cake — talk a little bit more about that.
Dasha Kelly: Number one, if I can have a 70-minute documentary and a 50-minute stage production about cake that is actually exploring race and class — and we're talking about cake — it makes it really difficult to continue the argument that this isn't something that we need to talk about.
It's in cake — from talking about access, from talking about the ways that things were put into place intentionally by design to marginalize, things are put into place by design to demean. One of the things, for example, with the GI Bill, when our veterans came home from the wars, there's the housing grants, there's the labor unions that came into place. There are things that are put in place for veterans to be able to come and start their homes and, you know, begin this incredible new life of the middle class — I'm sorry, as long as you're white.
And so to have that as a part of the conversation, that there was a point in our history where when we were figuring out how to bake and literally when they sliced bread, baking and bakeries became a huge business and the U.S. government in fact invested widely in bakeries and encouraged the veterans to move into this business — as long as you were white.
It's another example of a boom of an opportunity that was deliberately reserved for a small population of people. The Homesteading Act, you were able to get 150 acres of land by submitting an application, as long as you weren't a married woman, you weren't Asian, you weren't Latin, you weren't Native, you weren't Black, you weren't an immigrant from a non-Christian country, as long as you weren't a former Confederate soldier, as long as you weren't still indebted to sharecropping; a lot of things put in place once again to tip the scales for one very specific audience of people, namely white men.
This is what systemic looks like. This is what institutional looks like.
So, to have these experiences and particularly with the show as it tours to largely white audiences, largely in those bedroom cities outside of major metropolitan areas where they could easily fumble this conversation, right?
And for them to walk away and go, "Oh. I mean, intellectually I understand that this is a thing, and this is a challenge, but I now see. I now can accept that it literally is baked into everything." And I always I take every opportunity to remind folks that when you get information and you choose not to adopt it, you're being willfully ignorant.
So, that's really the exciting part of the design of being able to tell these stories in a very deliberate way that make it irrefutable that this was this was a recipe for the majority of us to suffer.
I like how you're using words connected to baking: recipe, everything's baked in. I also want to stay on the conversations you facilitate after the show. What are some of the things you hear from people when you are having those talk back conversations?
There was a woman in Madison — and and I always look up, I can see her in the balcony — and she says, "Listen, when you talked about this switch of the this ambitious, talented, educated woman being reduced, I'll use that word on purpose, reduced to this caricature of a homemaker. You've got the Betty Crocker and the string of pearls, and this is what a good wife does and if you don't know how to bake a cake from scratch, what what is your worth as a woman...in that era." She says "I lived through that and didn't realize I was living through this change." And I'm able to say that's how programming works. Those things are put in place on purpose.
I had a young boy in Virginia raise his hand at a school.
He said, “I really think it's unfair that Black women weren't given the right to vote at the same time?” I said, "I agree, young man, it was definitely unfair.” And to have that same conversation with grown women and they're part of whatever feminist progressive group to come to be a part of this dialogue and to be confronted with this reality that in all of this sisterhood and do-gooding and we're here as as a collective.
I'm able to also say historically white women choose their whiteness over being women. And here's an example — one of the things I tell about are these canning clubs, these home demonstration clubs where there was a whole government legion that went out to teach women how to take care of a household, how to do all these homemaking things which turned into the tradition of women's clubs.
And once those things were in place in this window of time, the women earn the right to vote. So, to say here you have all of this industry, all of this attention and all of these women of every shape, of every stripe working towards this goal, but still somehow only white women earn this right and then we had to come back and double back and fight for that.
And the part that I love is watching, this out-of-body experience ‘cause you're in a theater. In most cases I'm facilitating this discussion, people, they’re eating their cake in their seats and I'm, taking these questions and turning into discussion. You can feel their eyes get big and they're like, "I can't believe I'm about to say this thing in front of the theater full of people." And then they say it. And her hand just shot up and she says, "I just want to say that Italians were lynched too."
What was your relationship to cake before venturing into the "Makin' Cake" project and what is your relationship now? And what's your favorite cake?
My relationship to the venture of cake is the same. I didn't bake and I still don't bake. I figured out pretty early on that it's just not for me. It requires too much of a focused attention and it's not fun. My sister, however, she's the baker so we leave that to her. And my favorite cake is carrot cake.
For people who maybe haven't seen the stage play or even if they have and they want to come back and see the doc, what can you tell people they will get from the “Makin’ Cake" documentary?
What you're going to get from the “Makin’ Cake” documentary is a guided conversation about things that you already know. But one of the things they say in metaphysics is things don't exist until you observe them. And so in observing this reality you kind of step back and it makes it even more real.
And you also will leave with some cake tips. You'll leave inspired maybe to go and work on, and not just some sugar cookies, but break out that recipe. So, it's lighthearted in a lot in a lot of spaces too. And I believe that people are going to leave emboldened and aligned because we're all here right now together. And we all, for the most part, we all love cake.
Milwaukee Film is a financial supporter of WUWM.
_
