Taylor Mac makes audiences uncomfortable to make a point
Imagine yourself in a room, watching a performer with hairy legs and high heels sing. The performer then turns to the audience. You’re asked to turn to someone of the same gender, take them in your arms and slow dance. You must take it seriously.
How do you feel right now? Nervous? Happy? Why do you feel the way you do?
Such an activity could bring unspeakable joy, but it could also elicit fear or shame. Your shame, then, becomes part of the art happening in the room. The art, in other words, isn’t just focused on what the performer is doing but also on the emotional baggage you’ve brought with you that affects how you respond to the performer’s material.
Welcome to a Taylor Mac performance, or a slice of it. The same-sex slow dance is part of Mac’s performance-art piece, “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” a behemoth of a show that mixes dance, music and theater and made Mac a Pulitzer Prize finalist as well as the recipient of a MacArthur Genius
Grant.
A piece as sharply personal as it is political, it was described by the 2017 Pulitzer Board as “an inspired bardic creation that involves the audience in a marathon musical journey that challenges the persistent societal demons of racism, sexism and homophobia.”
The MacArthur Grant website, meanwhile, says this: “The enactment of a ‘gay junior prom’ in the 1966-1976 decade — in which the audience is asked to dance with a partner of the same gender — crystallizes Mac’s goal of transforming a roomful of strangers into something more intimate through shared experience.”
The show is an actual 24 hours in length, each hour dedicated to a decade’s worth of popular music that wrestles with America’s dark history — from the AIDS crisis to Japanese internment camps. It involves several moments of audience participation, but these moments aren’t there to merely entertain — they’re meant to challenge your way of thinking.
“We give permission to the audience to feel all the things they’re feeling. We say, ‘Everything you’re feeling is appropriate,’ ” explains Mac, who speaks at University of Houston at 6 p.m. Tuesday as part of the school’s Mitchell Artist Lecture series. “What I try to do is focus
their consideration on what they’re feeling. That’s part of the art in the room. Usually when you have audience participation, you’re trying to force fun on the audience. That’s not my goal. I’m trying to get them to pause, consider something they’ve never considered.”
Radical empathy
Not everyone is on board with Mac’s challenging ideas. Audience members have refused to dance with those of the same gender, or would only do it sarcastically. And in Mac’s nearly three-decade career, audiences have heckled and bullied the performer simply for wearing heels or wearing a dress. But
Mac has developed a philosophy for dealing with angry people. You invite them into the conversation, Mac says, but never let them take over.
“My drag mother, mother Flawless Sabrina, she was shot one time walking down the street in drag. She survived. When I spoke about the men who shot her — the homophobes — I spoke cruelly of them. But she said, ‘No, Taylor. They just wanted to be part of the show,’ ” Mac says. “There’s a certain level of radical empathy that I find more useful than taking on the techniques they were using to destroy another human being.”
This isn’t always easy. Sometimes haters and hecklers can take over the room. Mac, who is outspoken about American politics, talks about our current “heckler in chief,” and says dealing with hecklers serves as useful way for how our society should deal with our current president.
“Donald Trump has a complex of not being invited to the party. The trick I find with these types of people is you give them an invitation to the party,” Mac says. “But if they aren’t satisfied and are demanding to take over, then I have to shut them down, and they have to go somewhere.
“When we were kids, what did our parents do when we misbehaved? My mom would send me to sit in a chair to think about what I’d done. We just need to send Donald Trump away to sit in a chair for another decade so he can think about what he has done.”
The power of embarrassment
In Mac’s performances, audiences are often asked to engage in activities that they’re afraid might be embarrassing. Mac wants to explore that feeling of embarrassment and question why we’re so uncomfortable being vulnerable in public.
“The worst thing that can happen for a man is to be embarrassed. It’s pretty intense. We’re using ritual performance to sacrifice some of the things we’re holding onto that we don’t need to be holding onto anymore. A lot of that is about shame and embarrassment,”
Mac says. “We don’t have to feel so horrible about being embarrassed. We can let it go. So many people were afraid of losing face. It might get (Trump) elected again because people cannot recognize that he’s done anything wrong because they voted for him.”