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The Taylor Mac Book: Ritual, Realness and Radical Performance
David Román and Sean F. Edgecomb, Editors
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This is the first book to dedicate critical attention to the work of influential theater-maker Taylor Mac. Mac is particularly celebrated for the historic performance event A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, in which Mac, in fantastical costumes designed by collaborator Machine Dazzle, sang the history of the United States for 24 straight hours in October 2016. The MacArthur Foundation soon thereafter awarded their "genius" award to a "writer, director, actor, singer, and performance artist whose fearlessly experimental works dramatize the power of theater as a space for building community . . . [and who] interacts with the audience to inspire a reconsideration of assumptions about gender, identity, ethnicity, and performance itself."
Featuring essays, interviews, and commentaries by noted critics and artists, the volume examines the vastness of Mac's theatrical imagination, the singularity of their voice, the inclusiveness of their cultural insights and critiques, and the creativity they display through stylistic and formal qualities and the unorthodoxies of their personal and professional trajectories. Contributors consider the range of Mac's career as a playwright, performer, actor, and singer, expanding and enriching the conversation on this much-celebrated and deeply resonant body of work.
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
On Queer Pronouns and Gender as Performance
Introduction
One. The Early Performances of Taylor Mac
Two. Participation, Endurance, and the Pucker in Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge
Three. Between Hir and There
Four. Queer Pussy Time
Five. Too Slow
Six. Taylor Mac, Walt Whitman, and Adhesive America
Seven. Circles and Lines
Eight. Designturgy, Being Queer
Nine. Sing the Revolution!
Ten. The Walk Across America for Mother Earth
Eleven. An Interview with Taylor Mac
Twelve. Collaboration
Thirteen. “It’s going to go on a lot longer than you want it to”