TAYLOR MAC
photo by Little Fang Photography
Portland Ovations in association with State Theatre presents TAYLOR
MAC
A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (Abridged)
Conceived, written, performed and co-directed by
TAYLOR MAC
Music Director/Arranger MATT RAY
Executive Producer Linda Brumbach
Costume Designer MACHINE DAZZLE
Associate Producer Alisa E. Regas
Co-Produced by Pomegranate Arts and Nature’s Darlings
A 24-DECADE HISTORY OF POPULAR MUSIC is commissioned in part by ASU Gammage at Arizona State University; Belfast International Arts Festival and 14 - 18 NOW WW1 Centenary Art Commissions; Carole Shorenstein Hays, The Curran SF; Carolina Performing Arts, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA; Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa; Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; Melbourne Festival; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; International Festival of Arts & Ideas (New Haven); New York Live Arts; OZ Arts Nashville; Stanford Live at Stanford University; University Musical Society of the University of Michigan.
This work was developed with the support of the Park Avenue Armory residency program, MASS MoCa (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), New York Stage and Film & Vassar’s Powerhouse Theater, and the 2015 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab at the Sundance Resort with continuing post-lab dramaturgical support through its initiative with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
A 24-DECADE HISTORY OF POPULAR MUSIC was made possible with funding by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Project, with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Sept. 16 - 19,
A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (Abridged)
FEATURING
Taylor Mac Vocals WITH Matt Ray
Piano Machine Dazzle Performer
Bernice “Boom Boom” Brooks Drums
Ari Folman-Cohen Bass
Greg Glassman Trumpet
Jeremy Wilms
Guitar
LOCAL ARTIST
Alejandro Graciano
CREATIVE/PRODUCTION
Jimin Brelsford Sound Designer
Willa Folmar Company Manager
Paul Frydrychowski Lighting Assistant
Cassey Kivnick Stage Manager
Taylor Mac: Coming Together While Falling Apart
Unmaking/remaking American History
written by Sean F. Edgecomb
Although Taylor Mac is best known as a queer performance artist based in New York City, the spark that ignited A 24-Decade History of Popular Music can be traced to San Francisco in 1987. As an adolescent, he attended an AIDS Walk in the City by the Bay. Aside from this event being the first time that Mac was surrounded by other LGBTQ+ people en masse, he notes that it was especially poignant to be welcomed into a community that was coming together, through grief, kinship and activism, as it was falling apart, in a period when thousands of gay men succumbed to the AIDS epidemic. This process of unmaking and remaking is the model for A 24-Decade History, plumbing the depths of America’s past to remake trauma into stories of representation, humor and joy, resurrecting the voices of forgotten individuals who helped to build this nation. Since 2011, Mac and his arranger, Matt Ray, have been working on A 24-Decade History in close collaboration with executive producer Linda Brumbach and her creative production team at Pomegranate Arts. This culminated in a one-time, 24-hour marathon performance at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, October 2016. Continuing to tour in various formats (two-hour,
six-hour or twelve-hour) the show transforms with each iteration, highlighting Mac’s talent for improvisation and a passion for reflecting the time and place in which he appears as “judy,” the gender fluid, stage-worthy pronoun used by Mac in performance.
by Sarah
New England provides a particularly fecund ground for Mac’s alternative exploration of our history. On the cusp of celebrating its 400th anniversary, with the founding of Plymouth Plantation in 1620 and the bicentennial of Maine’s 1820 admission to the Union as the 23rd state, the region, perhaps more than any other in America, has a reputation for Puritan tenacity, revolutionary spirit, liberal discourse, Yankee thrift and social progress. Mac’s approach of unmaking and remaking historical
photo
Walker
narrative challenges the singularity of this perspective, reminding us that New England’s present is built on an ivy-covered foundation of genocide, settler colonialism, witch hunts, slavery, intolerance, classism and an inherited tradition of sweeping anything deemed uncouth under a proverbial antique rug.
While the colonial origins of the states that comprise this tour, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, might conjure up visions of Hawthorne-style folklore, revealing a venerable New England sensibility, Mac reorientates the audience to acknowledge just how recent immigrant culture is to the ancient land that indigenous Americans have inhabited for millennia. In fact, the broad historic/geographic scope of A 24-Decade History (reflected in Machine Dazzle’s fabulous costume designs) demands that New Englanders consider how we fit into the larger concept of post-1776 America as an ideological construct. In pushing aside traditional patriarchal history-making to focus on shared stories of diversity, Mac challenges us to reexamine where we have come from and how we might collectively process trauma and guilt to determine where we hope to go as a nation. In other words, this show is a new queered interpretation of the American experiment as an inclusive and collaborative experience of active
unmaking and remaking.
Following Mac’s commitment to performance as activism—the very same kind he experienced at the 1987 AIDS Walk, A 24-Decade History extends the notion of queerness from exclusive to inclusive. When the term queer was reclaimed in the early 1990s and was transformed from a homophobic pejorative into a rallying cry for visibility, it was primarily associated with the gay and lesbian community. Today queerness may be read as fluid umbrella term for those who refuse to live in the confines of the status quo. Embodied queerness, as demonstrated by Mac, is another form of unmaking and remaking, allowing individuals and subsequent communities to live life beyond societal and temporal boundaries, while remembering that New England and America are full of people who must be given the authority to tell their own stories on their own terms.
Mac actively makes new work as a performer and playwright including the recent Tony Award-nominated play, Gary, on Broadway; Holiday Sauce, a festive sequel to A 24-Decade History; and, his Dionysia Festival, an ongoing four-part project intended to mirror the all-day ritual theatre festivals of Ancient Athens.
-Sean F. Edgecomb grew up in Limestone, Maine and is currently Assistant Professor of Theatre at The Graduate Center & CSI, The City University of New York
BIOGRAPHIES
TAYLOR MAC (Creator/Writer/
Performer)
who uses“judy” (lowercase sic unless at the start of a sentence, just like a regular pronoun), not as a name but as a gender pronoun—is a playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, performance artist, director and producer. judy’s work has been performed in hundreds venues including on Broadway and in New York’s Town Hall, Lincoln Center, Celebrate Brooklyn, and Playwrights Horizons, as well as London’s Hackney Empire and Barbican, D.C.’s Kennedy Center, Los Angeles’s Royce Hall and Ace Theater (through the Center for the Art of Performance), Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, the Sydney Opera House, The Melbourne Festival (Forum Theater), Stockholm’s Sodra Theatern, the Spoleto Festival, and San Francisco’s Curran Theater and MOMA.
judy is the author of many works of theater including,Gary, A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Holiday Sauce, Hir, The Walk Across America for Mother Earth, Comparison is Violence, The Lily’s Revenge, The Young Ladies Of, Red Tide Blooming, The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac, Cardiac Arrest or Venus on a Half-Clam, The Face of Liberalism, Okay, Maurizio Pollini, A Crevice, and The Hot Month and the soon to be premiered plays Prosperous Fools and The Fre.
Sometimes Mac acts in other people’s plays (or co-creations).
Notably: Shen Teh/Shui Ta in The Foundry Theater’s production of Good Person of Szechwan at La Mama and the Public Theater, in the City Center’s Encores production of Gone Missing, Puck/Egeus in the Classic Stage Company’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and in the two-man vaudeville, The Last Two People On Earth opposite Mandy Patinkin and directed by Susan Stroman.
Mac is a MacArthur Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Drama, a Tony-nominated playwright, and the recipient of multiple awards including the Kennedy Prize, a NY Drama Critics Circle Award, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim, the Herb Alpert in Theater, the Peter Zeisler Memorial Award, the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, 2 Bessies, 2 Obies, a Helpmann, and an Ethyl Eichelberger Award. An alumnus of New Dramatists, judy is currently a New York Theater Workshop Usual Suspect and the Resident playwright at the Here Arts Center.
MATT RAY
(Music Director/ Arranger) is a Brooklyn-based pianist, singer, songwriter, arranger, and music director. His arrangements have been called “wizardly” (Time Out NY) and “ingenious” (NY Times), and his piano playing referred to as “classic, well-oiled swing” (NY Times) and “to cry for” (Ebony). For his work on Taylor Mac’s a 24-Decade History of Popular
Music he and Mac shared the 2017 Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired By American History. Notable live performances include playing at Carnegie Hall with Kat Edmonson, playing the Hollywood Bowl with reggae legend Burning Spear, and touring the Caribbean and Central America with his piano trio as a US Department of State Jazz Ambassador. His show Matt Ray Plays Hoagy Carmichael featuring Kat Edmonson premiered at Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series in 2018. Other work includes music directing The Billie Holiday Project at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, recording for and appearing in the hit film Can You Ever Forgive Me? with Justin Vivian Bond, Lincoln Center with Joey Arias, Edinburgh Fringe with Lady Rizo, music directing Taylor Mac’s Obie award winning play The Lily’s Revenge at the HERE Arts Center in New York, and co-writing songs for and performing in Bridget Everett’s one-hour Comedy Central special Gynecological Wonder as well as Everett’s hit show Rock Bottom. Matt has released two jazz albums as a leader: We Got It! (2001) and Lost In New York (2006); and one album of original pop/folk material called Songs For the Anonymous (2013). mattray.nyc
MACHINE
DAZZLE (Costume design, performer) has been dazzling stages via costumes, sets, and performance since his arrival in New York in 1994. Credits include Julie Atlas Muz’s Am The Moon And a You Are
The Man On Me (2004), Big Art Group’s House Of No More (2006), Justin Vivian Bond’s Lustre (2008), Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge (2009), Justin Vivian Bond’s Re:Galli Blonde (2011), Taylor Mac’s Walk Across America For Mother Earth (2012), Chris Tanner’s Football Head (2014), Soomi Kim’s Change (2015), Pig Iron Theater’s I Promised Myself To Live Faster (2015), Bombay Ricky Prototype Festival (2016), Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of American Popular Music (2016-Present), Opera Philadelphia’s Dito and Aeneus (2017), Spiegleworld’s Opium (Las Vegas 2018)... Beware!!!! Conceptualist-as-artist meets DIY meets “glitter rhymes with litter,” Machine was a co-recipient the 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Visual Design and the winner of a 2017 Henry Hewes Design Award.
BERNICE “BOOM BOOM” BROOKS (Drums) is a drummer, producer, teaching artist who has performed and shared the stage with such greats as Tito Puente, Gregory Hines, Patti Labelle, and many Jazz and R&B greats. She was a part of JALC The History of Blues with Marion Cowings and has a national commercial airing, Five Fine Fillies, for Bank of America.
ARI FOLMAN-COHEN (Bass) is an Electric and Upright bassist who dabbles in Synthesizers and Pennywhistle. Ari perf orms in New York City and around the world. Equally at ease in Pop and Rock worlds, Ari
tends towards experimental projects as well as Jazz and World Music collaborations. His solo projects navigate the improvisational and textural world of pedals and looping devices, mixing compositions and improvisation into dreamy trance inducing soundscapes or terse disturbing cacophony between ear catching melody. As bass player for Grammy award winning guitarist Stephane Wrembel, he holds down exciting and sturdy Gypsy Jazz bass lines. In Avant-Punk Mambo group Gato Loco, he thrashes melodically on the electric bass. When playing with his Ska and Rocksteady project Pangari and The Socialites, he supplies the melodic foundations. In addition to musical pursuits he works on his own film creations, as well as forays into short stories, cartoons and script writing.
GREG GLASSMAN (Trumpet) has shared the stage and recording studio with some of the greatest voices in jazz, including Clark Terry, Marcus Belgrave, Roswell Rudd, Sheila Jordan, Oliver Lake, Sherman Irby, and John Esposito. He has performed around the world with a diverse array of artists including The Skatalites, Oscar Perez’s Nuevo Comienzo, and Burning Spear. Mr. Glassman’s current focus is his quintet, co-led with Stacy Dillard, which holds a residency of 8 years at Fat Cat in Greenwich Village.
JEREMY WILMS (Guitar) is a composer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist based in New York City He’s jammed with Ornette Coleman at his loft and played Broadway revues at retirement communities in New Jersey (sometimes in the same weekend). He was briefly in Chico Hamilton’s band playing guitar, and played bass on Broadway in Fela! the musical. During the tour for Fela!, he played Water No Get Enemy in the wrong key with Fela Kuti’s son Femi at the Shrine in Lagos (the key was not his call). He’s on multiple recordings with Bebel Gilberto but only met her once, randomly, at a bar. Currently he is arranging strings and horns for many projects that might see the light of day. He is also currently a guitarist in the orchestra for MacArthur Fellowship winner Taylor Mac’s A-24 Decade History Of Popular Music as well as the bassist on ABC Network’s The Gong Show.
ALEJANDRO GRACIANO
Alejandro Graciano was born in the South Pacific Coast of Mexico where the rhythms of Cumbia, Merengue, Boleros,and Corridos (Mexican ballads), filled the air. Trumpet, guitars, bass, drums, and accordions were part of everyday life. From weddings to birthdays and funerals, live music was a must.
photo by Vess Pitts
MACHINE DAZZLE
RESIDENCY
Machine Dazzle wasborn
Matthew Flower in 1972 in Upper Darby Township, Pennsylvania. The middle child of three sons, Matthew was mostly raised by his mother Deborah, while his father James was away worrking as an engineer on oil tankers on the east coast for years.
The family moved to Houston, Texas and then eventually to Idaho Falls, Where Matthew felt alienated amongst the predominantly Mormon community. "I was always the tallest and the gayest." Machine Daxzze told Hilton Als wen speaking about this period of his life for a piece in The New Yorker.
Machine spent three days wth students at Maine College of Art (MECA) Working on costume design using materials seen in "A 24-Decade History of Popular Music" and providing mentorship on expressing their authentic selves.
“Working with Machine was a truly inspiring experience. I learned so much about my design style!”
-Savanna Pierce
Taylor Mac: A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (Abridged) is supported by:
photo by Little Fang Photography; cover photo by Little Fang Photography, costume by Machine Dazzle