"What you get to carry as a human being"
KCRW Reviews Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music
KCRW's theater critic, Anthony Byrnes, praises the extraordinary CAP UCLA presentation of Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music, and shouts out Executive and Artistic Director Kristy Edmunds' appearances in the UCLA Arts An Imaginative Offer series.
"Kristy Edmunds, the executive and artistic director of UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance, thinks of the exchange between a work of theater and it's audience profoundly. She says in a short film about the arts at UCLA.
"[The] public receives [a] work and it can charge them with a very different degree of empathy. You're catapulted into a world that you didn't even ever imagine existed and it changes what you get to carry as a human being."
I've heard Kristy Edmunds say versions of this a few dozen times and while I've always appreciated the eloquence, it existed for me more in the realm of aspiration than experience. Then I spent 24 hours with 1,600 other human beings being charged by the empathy of Taylor Mac's "A 24-Decade History of Popular Music" - a work that Ms. Edmunds brought to Los Angeles and was an early co-commissioner of - and now I've experienced that abstract idea made real."— Anthony Byrnes, March 26, 2018
This post is an excerpt, read the full article on the KCRW website.
Watch Kristy Edmunds in An Imaginative Offer
Watch Leaning Forward, the latest film in the An Imaginative Offer series spotlighting the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture's public arts institutions: UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance, the Fowler Museum, and the Hammer Museum
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