Art & Performance Notes

ART & PERFORMANCE NOTES

Emma Fält, On loneliness and contact—togetherness in drawing, one-hour workshop held at Draw to Perform 3, Crows Nest Gallery, London 31 July 2016. Photo: Courtesy Loredana Denicola. © 2016 Draw to Perform.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00349 by guest on 26 September 2021 A Ridiculous Look at the History of American Song

Kelly Aliano

Taylor Mac: A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Conceived, written, performed, and co-directed by Taylor Mac, co-directed by Niegel Smith, costumes by Machine Dazzle, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, NY, September 15–October 9, 2016.

his is my subjective take on history,” Taylor Mac reminded the audience ‘‘ during the third part of A 24-Decade History of Music. This incredibly Tambitious theatrical project takes subjectivity to the extreme, allowing Mac to tell the history of American culture not only through its popular music, but also through a very particular hybrid performance style: one built on a com- bination of rock concert, stand-up comedy show, cultural studies lecture, and the rich legacy of queer performance. Despite the varied tapestry that is woven together to create the show, this epic work ultimately transcends any individual legacy of which it may be a part.

The show is performed in an eight-part cycle with each “act” approximately three hours in length and covering three decades in American history. I partook of Act III (1836–1866), entitled “Puppets, Whitman, and Civil War Reenactment,” as well as Act VII (1956–1986), “A March, a Riot, and a Backroom Sex Party.” Despite their connective tissue, each hour of the performance offers a complete theatrical experience in and of itself. While some hours were more engaging than others, the completed cycle gives a thorough, thought-provoking, and rich over- view of musical history, the American experience, and perhaps most thrillingly the particularities of Mac’s subjective perspectives on the past. This imaginative and enlightening extravaganza is sprawling in its historical scope, and Mac regularly talks to the audience about his choice of songs, providing necessary context for each of the numbers. In addition, Mac creates an interactive performance space by engaging with the audience in ways that are both confrontational and delightful, rendering a performance experience unlike any traditional musical.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00349 by guest on 26 September 2021 Mac takes audiences on a journey that begins from the moment we enter the performance space. When I attended Act III, everyone was encouraged to grab a pillow and sit on the floor, inspiring a more intimate and communal sort of theatrical arrangement. It seemed as if we were all companions aboard a ship sailing across a sea of music history, with each individual sharing in something ephemeral and transcendent. But this inclusive soundscape is not without threat. Throughout the show, elements of the performance demand direct audience participation, such as dancing along with the music, holding up protest signs, or throwing ping-pong balls. In such a massive industrial-like space as St. Ann’s Warehouse, it might seem as though an individual could get lost in the audi- torium. To prevent this, Mac ensures that the performance extends throughout the space, even including the audience in the balcony seats for a back-room sex party sequence in Act VII.

Mac pushes the audience interaction even further by consistently calling upon audience members at random, subjecting them to participatory activities that vary from simply standing on stage while a song plays, to pretending to be a zombie, to becoming a deceased Judy Garland being carried out of the theatre. The feeling of comfort derived from the living-room-type setting in Act III was blended with a tense actor-audience relationship reminiscent of the loft performances of Jack Smith, during which Smith would invite friends over for an evening’s entertainment, only to make them wait hours for a performance to begin. Mac then would recruit them to perform in the show while judy (Mac’s preferred gender pronoun, lowercase sic) served as director-cum-tyrannical-dictator. Despite the community feeling that arose from being part of a Smith show, an audience’s bond could have developed as much from the cruelty of this setting as from its communal nature. Similarly, Mac does not shy away from this kind of mid-performance directing of (un)willing participants drawn from the crowd of spectators; however, judy approaches these interactions with a warmth that seems more reminiscent of children playing than of a raging auteur. The purpose, in Mac’s case, seems to make apparent that this is not a performance in which we can remain passive, but rather an experience in which we are playing an active part—an element that has defined much queer downtown performance from the time of Smith and his contemporaries, many of whom were key contributors in the formation of the Theatre of the Ridiculous movement in 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

Mac also borrows heavily from Smith’s trash aesthetic, a style perfected by downtown performance artist Ethyl Eichelberger, which involves combining complex costume pieces with all sorts of odds and ends, ranging from knick-knacks and eclectic collected items to actual garbage. The final result is a gender performance that defies categorization. With the help of costume designer Machine Dazzle,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00349 by guest on 26 September 2021 Clockwise from top left: Taylor Mac in Act VII, Act III, and Act VII, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. Photos: © Teddy Wolff; photos taken at St. Ann’s Warehouse.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00349 by guest on 26 September 2021 Mac uniquely tailors outfits to each particular decade, using everyday objects and colors iconic to the time interspersed with symbolic objects that, when blended together, create magnificent artistic creations in and of themselves. One notable example in Act III was a skirt decorated with junk food wrappers; when positioned appropriately on Mac’s hoop skirt, it gave the impression of a grand antebellum Southern belle gown. Unsurprisingly, Mac’s antecedent, the Ridiculous, was all about taking seemingly “low” items—like trash, but also elements derived from the so-called “disposable” popular culture—and raising them up to a high-art status through the transformative power of performance. Mac is a master of that in this piece, creating a show about popular songs and transforming them into the most essential markers of American history while offering a grand theatrical experience born of seemingly disposable component elements.

Indeed, the piece is clearly indebted to the legacy of the Ridiculous Theatre, a tradition for which Mac is perhaps the most important inheritor. Mac pays tribute to this inheritance in Act VII, calling out John Vaccaro and the Ridiculous by name. The Ridiculous tended to offer up as a performative sacrifice those things that we feel most guilty or awkward about to ultimately mock them and lead to their performative release. For example, rather than just shying away from “white guilt,” Mac had members of the audience give up their seats and engage in a humorous sequence about the Freedom Rides. In doing so, this Ridiculous form of mockery shed important light on a political idea—in this case, political activism and racial equality. By laughing, like the Ridiculous practitioners before him, Mac engaged his audiences in direct political commentary, and like the great Charles Ludlam, judy sprinkles this theatrical creation with refer- ences from every facet of American culture, from highbrow artistic techniques to lowbrow entertainment tropes. In Act III, Mac includes an exquisite shadow puppet sequence as well as an extended lucha libre reference. “The Ridiculous is a convenient name,” Ludlam once wrote. “Each time you do a play, it expands the definition of Ridiculous.”1 Ludlam’s notable quip suggests that there is room in Ridiculous theatrical practice for literally anything, and Mac takes this to the extreme, creating an epic marathon performance that brims over with content, more than could ever be summed up in a single review. To complete the theatrical run at St. Ann’s, Mac performed a 24-hour version of the show, pushing Taylor and judy’s co-performers to their limits: all eight parts performed back-to-back over the span of a single twenty-four-hour day. This choice suggests that Mac did not conceive of the piece as a concert series, but rather as a large-scale single concert, meant to be physically taxing and emotionally demanding for everyone involved in the proceedings.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00349 by guest on 26 September 2021 A 24-Decade History of Music is substantially researched, as Mac possesses a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of each period covered. But Mac smartly does not let the piece rest on familiar historical details. Instead, judy lets some of the stranger elements of American cultural history—such as Stephen Foster, the so- called father of American music, having died after hitting his head on a basin in a hotel room—be the stars of his narrative. In another moment, Mac retells the Stonewall history, emphasizing the importance of the recent death of Judy Garland on the night’s protests as well as the role of drag queens and people of color as instigators of the riot, elements that are sometimes questioned in descriptions of that night’s events. This queer approach to the telling of history emphasizes the details often overlooked in the historical archive. As Robert Mills puts it, “Queer-history exhibitions will adopt a style of presentation partly mod- eled on scrapbooks and collage; in place of the representative ‘object,’ they will appropriate fragments, snippets of gossip, speculations, irreverent half-truths.”2

Indeed, as we moved into the latter half of the twentieth century, Mac reminded us that Bob Dylan was able to reimagine music of the 1700s, noting directly to the audience, “You don’t have to accept what history gives you.” Instead, Mac’s performance evidences the potential to create personal narratives that focus on the elements that matter most, rendering them in a way most reflective of his individual experience in the world. Act VII epitomizes this ideal, taking many familiar popular songs of the 1970s and 80s and transforming them into something new. Most compelling is Mac’s reimagining—indeed translating—of Ted Nugent’s “Snakeskin Cowboys” into a new musical composition that brings the audience together in a same-sex “junior prom,” where nearly every spectator is forced into an intimate slow dance with a complete stranger. This moment emphasizes the communal nature of this experience and reminds us of how shared our history really is.

Mac is a truly gifted performer, bringing an innovative aesthetic and great musical prowess to this incredible mélange of musical numbers. Mac brings pop art back to the contemporary moment as the Campbell’s soup cans return in the trim of judy’s Jackie Kennedy-style pink suit. In the tradition of the Ridiculous, Mac reconfigures the cultural hierarchies of the past, but does so in a way that feels fully fresh and includes the audience in a meaningful and enjoyable manner. This twenty-four-hour cycle of music is a reminder of some favorite tunes from the past (as well as more obscure selections), while often casting those numbers in a brand new light. Mac raises questions of race, gender, sexuality, and poli- tics in ways that are not merely confrontational or didactic (although judy does encourage some incendiary tweeting at a certain politician in Act VII!). Instead, through a vision of the theatre as a living, breathing space in which individuals

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00349 by guest on 26 September 2021 share in an entertaining experience of play, Mac has created something unique: a performance that is not a polished play, but a work of art only made complete by the inclusion of everyone present in the improvisatory, communal moment of live performance.

Whether dipping into the cycle for a single act or indulging in the entire twenty- four-hour marathon performance, audiences will certainly walk away with more knowledge of the American songbook and history. Indeed, Mac offers audiences a new vision of theatrical experience and a queered definition of what it means to be an American. And that is something worth singing about.

NOTES 1. Charles Ludlam, Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly, Ed. Steven Samuels (New York: Theatre Communications Group: 1992), 131. 2. Robert Mills, “Queer Is Here? Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Histories and Public Culture,” History Workshop Journal, no. 62 (Autumn 2006): 253–63, 262.

KELLY ALIANO has a PhD in Theatre from The Graduate Center, CUNY. She regularly writes about the Theatre of the Ridiculous as well as the field of Video Game Studies. She currently teaches at LaGuardia Com- munity College and Hunter College.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00349 by guest on 26 September 2021