How does one even begin to talk about a performance like this?
24 hours, covering 240 years of American history, with over 100 performers, where the audience are, according to Taylor Mac, “the sacrifice” and find themselves doing anything from being blindfolded, to throwing things at one another, to dancing and screaming and kissing. I’ve never experienced anything like it, and it has become my benchmark for what art is capable of. Programmed as the headline event of this year’s Melbourne Festival, Taylor Mac’s raucous, anarchic, drag-performance-art extravaganza A 24-Decade History of Popular Music was performed over four 6-hour no-intermission chapters over 2 weeks in the Forum Theatre. And what a glorious 24 hours it was.
Taylor Mac is a drag performer and musician originally from California, who rose to prominence in gay clubs in New York and is now a globally esteemed performer. Indeed, on the evening of the first chapter, Mac was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in recognition of an extraordinary contribution to performance. Mac, who uses the pronoun ‘judy’ (because it is impossible for someone to roll their eyes and disparage that choice without looking impossibly camp), is a staggeringly charismatic performer with some serious vocal skills, and the ability to command (quite literally in this case) an audience, empowering them to participate in the most ridiculous and often surprisingly meaningful shenanigans. The other major players in this performance are musical director Matt Ray, who arranged all 246 songs in the show and is on stage performing for 23 of the 24 hours, and costume designer Machine Dazzle, who dresses Mac in a new sublimely overwhelming, reference-laden drag ensemble every hour. Each hour-long decade consisted of story telling, audience participation, and performances of the most popular songs of that time period.
These three are joined by a wonderful band made up of local and New York musicians, and a group of Dandy Minions - local drag performers and performance artists who facilitate the entire show, hand things out to audience members, roam the auditorium, and perform “random acts of fabulousness” across the entire duration of the work. The Dandy Minions embody what Mac calls "the spirit of dandy" throughout the show, guiding the audience through the experience like outrageously fabulous hosts. They help Mac to facilitate one of the main aims of this show, which is to create a community over the course of 24 hours; a community that is queer, intersectional, outrageous, contradictory, silly, serious, supportive, and joyous. It's not an echo chamber by any means - across the four chapters an adage is reiterated - "You don't have to agree with me, and that's great". This show is alive to human history and the human experience beyond stubborn binary thinking. It revels in its own contradictions and encourages audiences to do the same. It feels like a tonic for public discourse that is aggressively black and white.
The amount of content packed into this show was quite frankly overwhelming, but in order to get a sense of the structural, cultural, and narrative arc that brought all four chapters together, I think it's important to discuss them one by one. The opening of the entire show involved a resplendent Taylor Mac entering from the back of the auditorium and grabbing an audience member on the way to the stage. Everyone in the audience stood up, and we were told that we were about to participate in a "radical faerie realness ritual sacrifice" where we, of course, were the sacrifice. Commanded to wave our hands and shake our bodies and yell in tongues worshipping this one audience member on the stage, we were told that this performance was about the verb not the noun, the act of creation rather than the thing created, the process and not the product, the event-ness of the event. It was in this opening five minutes, with the assertion of the liveness of performance and the radical potential inherent in co-creation between artists and audience, that I (who at this point only had a ticket to one chapter) realised that I absolutely had to go to the full 24 hours.
Chapter I: 1776 - 1836
Yankee Doodle is an iconic American song, and the show really kicked off with the story of how this all-American anthem was actually a revolution-era English song, written to mock the Americans for being tasteless and trashy. Until, apparently, after a decisive victory during the American Revolution, American soldiers rounded up the surviving English troops, surrounded them, and made them dance to the song while poking them with bayonets. Recreating this particular event, Mac also incorporated the early distaste for government, the importance of making things, and the child-like nature of early American society. Somehow, this meant that during the singing of this song, everyone got dressed up in drag handed out by Dandy Minions, some audience members were dancing while surrounded by the rest of the audience poking them, everyone was tearing up sheets of paper with the names of Revolution-era senators on them and throwing the confetti into the air, a naked Dandy Minion was running around the auditorium while two audience members tried in vain to tackle and dress him, everyone was singing the song, and a group of people were benignly knitting on the stage. It was utter joyous chaos, and set the tone for the 23.5 hours to come.
The early Women's Lib movement was covered, and globally renowned Australian cabaret performer Meow Meow made a cameo as a suffragette and was crowd-surfed around the auditorium twice while singing an early feminist song, as the audience all gleefully ate apples. The post-Revolution alcohol boom meant that the Forum theatre was turned into something between a 1790s tavern and a frat-party, where the audience were all given beer and ping pong balls, and we sang drinking songs for an hour, threw the ping pong balls at a temperance choir or spat them at each other and tried to catch them in our mouths, while Taylor Mac (dressed in a bedazzled ale barrel) sat on the bar and sung songs by gargling what looked like red wine. The figure of "crazy Jane" who appears in most of these songs was appropriated through anecdotes from Mac and the audience, of particularly 'legendary' nights and unfortunate spewing situations.
In a particularly audacious move, the entire audience was blindfolded for a full hour, and told not to peek on pain of being publicly and acerbically called out. If we were tempted to peak, Mac told us to ask ourselves "Am I really in mortal danger? Or am I just having a bourgeois crisis?". We were asked to experience the show through other senses - feeding each other grapes, smelling flowers and touching other audience members with them. Given the precedent for audience involvement set from the very beginning, the audience were completely willing to go along with this, in addition to a great many other things - making a full audience heteronormative monument to the war of 1812, all the bearded men stripping and dancing to create an early 1800s titty bar, singing, drinking, eating, resting our heads in one another's laps.
The most dramaturgically brilliant bit of Chapter I however was the creation of a heteronormative jukebox musical, which actually became an extended metaphor for colonialism and an exploration of the forced displacement of Native Americans on the Trail of Tears. This show was not afraid to expose the ugliest parts of history, and to remind us of the horror that sits within the foundational structures of our societies and communities. Prominent Australian Indigenous elder Aunty Di did a Welcome to Country at the very beginning of the show, and it set the tone for this later segment as a radical intervention into the way that we tell the stories of ourselves and our societies. I left the theatre at the end of the first 6 hours utterly elated, and also rattled and invigorated and perplexed. I organised my tickets for the remaining three chapters the very next morning.
Chapter II: 1836 - 1896
This chapter was about conflict - it began with a cage fight between Walt Whitman and Stephen Forster over who would be the Father of the American Song, moved through the divisions between North and South during the American Civil War, looked at conflict within the abolitionist movement, and the divisions in post-Civil War America.
One of the most beautiful moments of this chapter was when every audience member closed their eyes while Mac read out a Walt Whitman poem - indeed over the 24 hours, often the quiet moments were the most affecting, made more so by the raucous performance in which they were embedded. The disturbing popularity of Forster's minstrel songs underpinned a decade exploring the abolitionist movement and the tonally misguided (although often well-meaning) songs by white musicians, as they contrasted with the raw strength and hope of the music of the enslaved. Here Mac ceded the stage to musicians and performers of colour, ultimately striking a note of hope and resilience. Chanon Judson's dancing was a highlight of the show.
The American Civil War was retold through the "queerest reenactment in history" with Mac dressed in a crinoline made of phallic hot-dogs, as songs exploring love between soldiers were sung, a Confederate prisoner was gleefully taunted by naked Dandy Minions, and the audience participated in not one, but two Civil War battles. The first involved pelting ping pong balls at the opposing army, and the second was an outrageous slow-motion battle that left an entire auditorium in fits of breathless laughter. In this second chapter, the audience really got into the swing of the involvement and participation - I don't think I've ever seen group of people so spontaneously involved in something as the audience were during the slo-mo battle. Chairs were lifted, walls were climbed, venue staff were up in arms - it was utterly glorious.
Post Civil-War, Mother (Taylor Mac, of course) wanted everyone to sit down for a nice family dinner, without politics getting in the way. Of course, and this particular family dinner devolved into a production of the Mikado transplanted to Mars in order to strip it of its blatant orientalism. This idea was so outrageous and outlandish, and was committed to so wholeheartedly, that it somehow worked. What initially seemed ridiculous and almost tangential, turned into a big, gay martian wedding, and became a potent political statement for the current Australian cultural climate. The personal is always political.
In the last hour, we moved every chair in the auditorium, went out West as hardy pioneers, and participated in the Oklahoma land grab (a race for a limited number of balloons dropped from the ceiling). I managed to secure a plot of land in Oklahoma, and ended this chapter standing right in front of the stage, looking adoringly and reverently up at Mac as judy sang the most popular American song of all time - After the Ball. In a sociopolitical system based on a lottery, in this chapter we learned that cheap sentiment is at the foundation of large scale American cultural coping mechanisms.
Chapter III: 1896 - 1956
This chapter began in the Jewish tenements in New York City, and I migrated from the audience (Eastern Europe) to the tenement on stage for the first hour of the show, as the extended migrant family experience was explored through songs written in and for the tenement communities. The grand ideals of romance in the first decade of the 20th Century quickly turned to cynicism as every male in the audience between the ages of 14 and 40 was drafted into WWI, and brought up on stage into the trenches. A rousing audience rendition of I Didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier and its pro-war appropriation demonstrated the changing tides of martial attitudes in American society. A bottle of rum was passed around on stage, gay relationships in the trenches flourished, and all the women left at home turned Keep the Home Fires Burning into a punk-rock anthem, during an extended discussion about lesbian fisting. I'm not kidding.
The post-war celebration was structured through a narrative about how we deal with trauma - is it possible to put large-scale cultural trauma aside and find joy? The roaring 20s speakeasy (featuring a sublime performance from queer Melbourne artist Mama Alto) was undercut by a traumatised soldier reading Ulysses. The oldest and youngest audience members got up on stage, and the oldest taught the youngest how to dance. This then turned into a beautiful, joyful intergenerational dance party - everyone under the age of 55 had to copy the moves of someone over 55. The final moments of this decade however were some of my favourite of the entire show - Mac sat on stage and read the last page of Ulysses aloud, finishing with the famous "yes I said yes I will Yes". I'm not quite sure what made it so special, but it was one of the most profound moments I have ever experienced as an audience member.
During the Depression, the theatre was turned into a soup kitchen, and every audience member had a bowl of soup and a chat, before we listened to a Woody Guthrie song that really communicated the power of song as a mode of storytelling, connection, and validation of individual struggle within a collective setting. During WWII, we stayed home and had babies, did swing dancing, and started the 20th Century tradition of racially profiling and vilifying communities of imprisoned minorities. Songs sung by Japanese prisoners and Mexican labourers showed the power of music to pull together communities that are being torn apart. In one of the most memorable moments of the show, Don't Fence Me In was performed by two Australian Indigenous performers on a didgeridoo and clap sticks. Mac made the point that "when people build fences to fence other people out, the end up fencing themselves in". The atomic bomb didn't need to be explained - the searing performance of Ghost Riders and the poem that was recited after it magnificently captured the global trauma of this seismic event.
During the 50s, there was a magnificently queer "dirty glamour" burlesque performance, and all the white people in the audience slow-motion ran to the suburbs, while the POC all moved into the best seats in the house. Predictably, this move showed up the lack of diversity in Melbourne theatre audiences and was accompanied by some acerbic commentary. Given the prominence of the 50s as the period often referred to in vile "Make American Great Again" discourse, this decade was about dismantling and emasculating the patriarch. Mac stated that the white people could keep all the POC out of the suburbs, but they couldn't stop the little white queer from growing up amongst them, and the recontextualisation of iconic songs such as Folsom Prison Blues was dramaturgically brilliant. All the straight boys in their 20s (there were about 10) got up on stage for a hilarious lesson in gay deportment that devolved into a particularly raucous and filthy dance, and one boy ended up piggy-backing Mac around the stage as they tried to hide their relationship in a conservative 50s white-bread suburb. The end of this chapter was the move of the queers back to the city, in a whole audience dance party that was a glorious celebration of the emergence of queer culture into mainstream view. It was outrageously fun, and also felt like an incredibly important validation and celebration, highly significant to the here and now.
Chapter IV: 1956 - present
Dressed in a Jackie-O outfit with an Andy Warhol soup can stole, to begin the final chapter Taylor Mac literally descended from on high for the March on Washington, singing The Supremes, Curtis Mayfield, and Nina Simone's Mississippi Goddamn. This final chapter was really a celebration and exploration of the queer culture that has always been present throughout history becoming visible and significant and radically disruptive in the mainstream. Given that this chapter took place in the lives of a great many of the audience members, the focus was more on reframing dominant musical narratives than on large-scale audience participation. We held a funeral for Judy Garland while all belting out Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John, we went to the riots at Stonewall, and we held a big gay junior prom, slow dancing with someone of the same gender to a song by Ted Nugent, who is a violently homophobic Trump supporter.
There was a wild backroom sex party, a singalong to Gloria, and a discussion of sexual deviance as radical and revolutionary - as Mac said from on top of a ladder, whilst regaling us with anecdotes about anonymous backroom sex parties, "You won't see this at Tree of Codes". The Cold War was (as perhaps it was in reality) two giant inflatable penises, one pattered with stars and stripes and the other with the hammer and sickle, impotently prodding at one another before prematurely ejaculating and deflating, all set to the soundtrack of David Bowie's Heroes.
This chapter was also about farewells. Over the course of the 24 hours, a musician had left the stage each hour, so that the full band of the 1770s dwindled to three, then two, then Taylor Mac alone for the last hour. We farewelled Machine Dazzle, who had been a huge part of the performance dressing Mac onstage, before the AIDS crisis, because it was important for the audience to experience the loss of a performer "they thought they would have until the end". Mac talked about judy's first experience seeing openly gay people at the AIDS walk in San Francisco in the late 80s, and sang songs by musicians who were openly gay at the time. The 90s decade was dedicated to celebrating radical lesbians, who all held a tailgate barbecue on stage and sang songs important to the movement at that point in time. Instead of Madonna and Michael Jackson, the music was Riot Grrl and Ferron. It was a beautiful moment of reaching out to a community that spent so much of history putting its own struggle aside for other, seemingly larger struggles. A powerful performance of Lauryn Hill's Everything is Everything felt like an encapsulation of the entire show. Matt Ray, the brilliant musical director, was chaired out of the theatre as the audience stomped and cheered.
In the last hour, it was just Taylor Mac, alone on stage with a banjo, a piano, and a ukulele, dressed in a vagina ballgown, signing original songs. Somehow, after 24 hours, judy still had the vocal stamina to play songs that seemed to tie up all the loose ends - dandies, communities, subcultures, the intermingling of joy and pain. In the end, it was just the audience, singing the chorus of one of these songs - "you can lie here, or you can get up and play" - as the lights faded and Mac left the stage. We were left singing in the dark. I was weeping, so were people around me, and when everyone came out to take a curtain call, it felt as though there wasn't a dry eye in the house. The performers rightfully got the biggest ovation I have ever seen.
It sounds hyperbolic, but the 24 hours of this show have been 24 of the most joyful, powerful, special hours of my life. I feel genuinely privileged to have experienced this, and to have been a part of the community that was created over these four shows. Even in this piece of writing, I feel that I haven't been able to convey what it was to be a part of this work of art. The intervention of queer audience culture - responsive, pluralistic, accepting, and challenging - into a mainstream arts festival, was radical and important. At a period in Australian cultural history where the validity of queer relationships are considered a matter for public debate, it felt incredibly important to have a show like this, that rejoices in the queering of history and in the outsiders that have been consistently excluded from cultural narratives - Mac reminds us of what we've forgotten, or repressed, or had other people repress for us.
Matt Ray's musical arrangements were constantly surprising and beautiful, reframing dominant cultural narratives and creating a beating heart at the centre of this show. Mac's vocal and physical performance was nothing short of astonishing.
At the moment, it feels as though the world is faced with problems of enormous scale and complexity, and I feel as though these problems need works of scale such as this to counteract and disrupt them. This show set out to create a community, and for 24 blissful, anarchic, chaotic hours, I got to experience what this community could be, and by extension what we, as a human community, are capable of. We are capable of joy and chaos, of reconciliation and resilience and acceptance and challenge and resistance - the potential inherent within the human community is truly glorious, and I feel privileged to have glimpsed it, and I'll remember it until the day I die. Now it's time to go out and make Taylor Mac's world happen.