Taylor Mac on gay history, 'Hamilton' and his epic 24-hour extravaganza at the Ace
“I believe theater is community and I think of myself as a community activist; someone whose job it is to bring people together, give them a shared experience and remind them of the things they’ve forgotten, dismissed or buried.” -Taylor Mac
In Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, he charts the history of popular music and activism in America, from the nation’s founding in 1776 to the present day.
"The professors and university mandarins having lunch at an elegant UCLA campus restaurant the other day had no idea that seated inconspicuously among them was a cultural revolutionary. Wearing a knit cap and eating a flank steak, playwright and performance artist Taylor Mac patiently fielded questions about the staggeringly ambitious production that is about to take over Los Angeles.
UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance is presenting Mac's chef-d'oeuvre, "A 24-Decade History of Popular Music," in a four-show series at the Theatre at Ace Hotel beginning Thursday. Broken into six-hour installments spaced out over two weeks, the hallucinatory concert extravaganza is being custom tailored, with local musicians, guest artists and glittery supernumeraries brought in for the occasion.
Mac, a galvanic performer who combines the otherworldly gender fluidity of Ziggy Stardust and the unstoppable razzle-dazzle of a post-modern Liza Minnelli, could easily stop traffic in these groves of academe with a simple change in headdress. The costumes for the 24-hour production, couture concoctions of mad brilliance by the designer known as Machine Dazzle, serve as glittery chrysalises for the astonishing transformations Mac undergoes while leading us decade by decade through American history via the reinterpretation and reframing of our music heritage.
A California native raised in Stockton who lives in New York with an architect husband, Mac examines the nation's past (from its Revolutionary beginnings through the bloody wreckage of the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond) through a queer lens, but stresses that the work is not ultimately about identity: "Identity politics is just not interesting enough to me," Mac said. "That doesn't mean my identity isn't declared or referenced. I'm queer, but the work is not about queerness. It's always there, but it's not the point."— Charles McNulty, Mar. 14, 2018
This post is an excerpt, read the full article on the Los Angeles Times website.
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