Taylor Mac “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” at St. Ann’s Warehouse (photograph by Teddy Wolff); Walt Whitman (photograph by Matthew Brady)
The following is an edited excerpt from The Taylor Mac Book: Ritual, Realness and Radical Performance, an anthology of essays about judy’s work and its significance, to be printed in February by University of Michigan Press.
On receiving the Edwin Booth Award on the City University of New York’s Graduate Center on April 28, 2017, Taylor Mac selected neither to provide a speech nor to sing a tune, however somewhat to learn aloud Walt Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Several minutes into the recitation, he interjected, “Don’t worry, just 25 more pages! Because Walt Whitman, like me, likes to make something go on a little bit longer than it should.” Delivered with sorry-not-sorry aplomb, it was a line assured to allure the viewers—and maybe additionally to recapture the eye of minds wandering away from a 26-stanza poem written within the mid-Nineteenth century. But it additionally calls consideration to what I argue is Whitman’s aesthetic and political place in A 24-Decade History of Popular Music: at its heart.
That Whitman is among the History’s heroes is clear to anybody who has heard and seen Mac recite parts of Leaves of Grass throughout performances of the 1846–56 section. In “Whitman vs. Foster: Songs Popular Near the Breaking Point,” Mac champions the poet because the true “Father of American Song” within the first moments of what’s alleged to be a knock-down, drag-out battle for that title. Whitman’s opponent on this unabashedly rigged contest is Stephen Collins Foster (1826–64), the composer and lyricist who’s normally granted the accolade. Staged throughout the 24-hour St. Ann’s Warehouse efficiency (Oct. 8-9, 2016) as a mock wrestling match carried out in and round a pink, white, and blue-roped ring, “Whitman vs. Foster” argues that the aesthetically progressive and politically progressive Leaves of Grass is the “song” we must always have heard America singing since its preliminary publication in 1855. Historically, after all, what a lot of America was truly singing throughout that decade—and lengthy after—had been Foster’s indelible tunes. A large readership was nonetheless out of Whitman’s attain; his eventual canonization as America’s “Good Gray Poet” would have appeared unimaginable, even perhaps to him, in the course of the interval encompassed by the History section.
I need to clarify the details, in addition to the stakes, of my argument concerning the present’s uptake of Whitman’s poem and his preliminary persona. Whitman’s imaginative and prescient of America—aptly described by Thomas Yingling as a “homosexual utopia”—and his poetic observe of superabundance permeate the History. Like Whitman, Mac not solely “hear[s] America singing,” but additionally is singing a particularly queer America into being. It is a capacious, numerous, and perpetually emergent utopia—a poetic entity that provides its individuals an prolonged length through which they will really feel what the nation has been, is now, and would possibly turn into if all of us “get up and play” with and for each other. I name up Yingling’s circa-1992 essay right here as a result of he was one of many first publicly out American students to acknowledge that the types of same-sex attachment articulated in Leaves are integral to its politics. Before he may full that essay Yingling died of AIDS, like the various 1000’s of homosexual individuals whose relentless activism within the face of widespread sickness and murderous authorities indifference impressed not solely the History, but additionally the dedication to queer community-building evident in all Mac’s work. Yingling helped seed a thriving discipline of Whitman scholarship that has formed Mac’s understanding of the poem and his efficiency of its politics, whether or not or not we consider judy’s jokey disavowals of educational requirements. (Calling the viewers’s consideration to the history-inspired particulars of designer Machine Dazzle’s intricate costumes, Mac requested, “What about this says more than Wikipedia?”) I draw on that Whitman scholarship, sparingly however pointedly, to indicate how and why Mac’s very modern American History elevates the Nineteenth-century bard of democratic bonding.
In Whitman’s American utopia, and in Mac’s, what binds the nation shouldn’t be the state, a lot much less its elected officers. (So skeptical is Mac of all leaders that the History disperses his personal authority in its first minutes, when judy bids the viewers to “worship the act of creation, not the creator.”) It shouldn’t be the land that lies between its perpetually contested borders. It shouldn’t be even a shared tradition. It is love—a really specific kind of affection that Whitman referred to as “adhesive,” utilizing a time period of his period. This shouldn’t be the love of the heterosexual reproductive pair privileged by church, state, and practically all mass cultural merchandise. Adhesive love is erotic, however not essentially genital; it’s of the physique, but it transcends the flesh. It is intimate, however not private; certainly, adhesive lovers may be strangers. Though some “comrades” are nearer than others, the union they construct is nonexclusive and nonproprietary. “In Whitman’s homoerotic vistas,” Betsy Erkkila explains, “the love of strangers models the public culture of male love that he imagines as the future of democracy: the stranger exists as an unknown figure, a foreigner in public space, outside the prescribed intimacies of home, marriage, and family.” Both Whitman and Mac current queer, public sexual expression as the bottom on which they and their audiences are creating an American utopia that continues to be at all times on the horizon. Whitman’s poem privileges cruising in New York City’s streets, whereas Mac’s efficiency exalts nameless intercourse in its nightclubs. Both artists supply up their exceedingly open, adhesive, absorptive, multiplicitous, temporally transcendent our bodies and works as exemplars of queer, utopian, democratic world-making. Hearing that studying of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” I couldn’t assist however take into consideration how Mac’s alternative of textual content, just like the number of that exact waterfront location for the New York City History performances, ties into what Jose Esteban Muñoz recognized as an exceptionally “dense connective site in the North American queer imagination”—a cruising floor, in lots of senses. For each Whitman and Mac, the waterfront pulses with what Muñoz so influentially described as “the possibility of queer transport, leaving the here and now for a then and there” that enfolds the turbulent previous whereas enabling a freer future. It is the potential of that future to which the Nineteenth-century poet and the Twenty first-century performer dedicate themselves, their audiences, and their maximalist works.
‘Longer Than It Should’: Superabundance and Queer Aesthetics
Having mentioned how Mac and his audiences are cruising an American utopia, I now return to his assertion that the History, like Whitman’s poem, should go on “a bit longer than it should.” Among the various arguments that students and artists have made about durational efficiency is that its comparatively excessive size disrupts the late-capitalist—which can also be to say heterosexist—temporal regime that Elizabeth Freeman calls “chrononormativity.” For Mac, a significant advantage of durational efficiency is that its jarring size dislodges viewers members from their common, work-oriented schedules and releases them into an altered state through which they will turn into “deranged in their emotional availability.” He believes that this distinctly queer temporality makes it potential for all viewers members to “transform”—or, on the very least, to glimpse alternate options to the distressing day-to-day and historic timelines through which they dwell.
While the History is Mac’s longest produced work to this point, it’s not the one one that may be described as durational. Near the highest of The Lily’s Revenge (2009), a personality informs the viewers that “This play is LOOOOOOOONG”—and it’s, by anybody else’s requirements. Over practically 5 hours, throughout 5 acts, a forged of 40 performs an allegorical and boisterously theatrical destruction of recent Western dramatic constructions that comprise social issues—typically resolved with a marriage—inside an simply digestible two-hour timeframe. “Culinary theatre” is the dismissive time period given to those dramatic varieties by Bertolt Brecht, whose Good Person of Szechwan Mac carried out to such piquant and poignant impact in 2013 with the Foundry Theatre. However, within the absence of different aesthetic qualities, temporal indigestibility doesn’t a queer efficiency make. Forced Entertainment additionally does 24-hour exhibits; they, too, are messy, metatheatrical, and marvelous. But they don’t seem to be queer. The Lily’s Revenge and the History are queer durational performances as a result of Mac and firm complement these prolonged working instances with different types of aesthetic extremity, together with a particular fashion that Jason Fitzgerald describes as “camp extravaganza” inflected by an “adorable, comic self-deprecation,” a eager intelligence, and a deep moral dedication to community-building. Sean F. Edgecomb persuasively hyperlinks this fashion to Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre, with its blatant theatricality, its formal multiplicity, and its outsized mental and political ambition. In Ludlam’s performs and in Mac’s durational work, genderfuck meets genrefuck; extra—hyperbole, even—is essential to the artwork and important to its politics.
Too-muchness of too many varieties is what makes Mac’s durational artwork queer. Too-muchness can also be a first-rate Whitmanian trait, as Mac acknowledged explicitly at CUNY and implicitly throughout History performances. Among Whitman’s many formal improvements is the well-known “long line,” that major unit of his free verse that’s so very capacious and so absolutely versatile that it generally appears like disquisitory prose. (Indeed, within the 1855 version, a lot of the poetry seems to be very very like prose, too.) Not solely are the strains lengthy; the poems inside Leaves can themselves really feel infinite, particularly when Whitman goes into catalog mode. As metapoetical as Mac is metatheatrical, Whitman writes that he “Know[s] my omnivorous lines and cannot write any less.” Mac delivers these omnivorous strains with vocal virtuosity, however even he has to push to this point towards the top of his breath whereas reciting them that the viewers whistles and applauds in appreciation of what they acknowledge as a feat of psychological and bodily endurance. Moreover, Mac’s choice exhibits a desire for Whitman’s longest poems, together with “Song of Myself,” “Song of the Open Road,” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” It is these poems that James Perrin Warren cites when he writes that “the long line captures the expansive freedom of Whitman’s poetic style and evokes his vision of an expansive American culture,” including that “it is nonetheless an orderly poetic practice.” Both Leaves and the History are as capacious as they’re as a result of they need to make room for dysfunction in addition to order, for disintegration and integration, for gathering and dispersal—in Mac’s phrases, for “falling apart” in addition to “building up.” The artists construct imperfection and failure into their respective initiatives, arguing strenuously that it’s as a result of they depart from normative aesthetics that they will do actual democratic work.
Mac’s chorus, “Perfection is for assholes,” is a quip worthy of one other queer apostle of aesthetic extra, Oscar Wilde, nevertheless far its sentiment departs from Wilde’s personal penchant for polished surfaces. Imperfection affords an accessibility that each Mac and Whitman hyperlink to the favored. Explaining the alternatives he made when compiling the History’s set record, Mac stated that “classical song is about reaching for perfection—touching the hem of God. Popular song is about reaching the people, and it uses its imperfection in order to do that.” Mac, like Whitman’s “American bard,” is aware of that “the pleasure of poems is not in them that take the handsomest measure and similes and sound,” and the individuals’s pleasure can’t be sacrificed if the artwork is to do its work. That work is nothing lower than making a completely democratic world, the type of which is as unfixed because the East River, whose unceasing ebb and circulate Whitman and Mac current as a imaginative and prescient of a queer utopian aesthetics that encompasses the poem, the poet, and the individuals: “The simple, compact, well-joined scheme—myself / disintegrated, every one disintegrated, yet part / of the scheme.”
The Archival ‘Body Electric’
You, too, are a part of the scheme. Yes, you, reader, whoever and each time you might be. Whitman’s poem insists that he’s cruising you proper now as you learn his strains, and was cruising all of us gathered on the East River’s financial institution in October 2016, who caught glimpses of the “flood-tide” and “ebb tide,” on which he’d constructed a lot of his poetry and democratic principle, as we took breathers or smoke breaks or made calls or seemed throughout on the bridge or the skyline or up on the stars or the daybreak or the rain or the entire above in the course of the St. Ann’s Warehouse exhibits.
I’m with you, you women and men of a era,
or ever so many generations therefore;
I mission myself—additionally I return—I’m with you, and understand how it’s.
The medium that ensured Whitman’s entry to you is the e book, which he knew learn how to design, compose, print, bind, and promote. His poems are replete with language that creates a posh erotic bond between author and reader that extends throughout time and area as a result of books do. The poet won’t know your title—certainly it’s extra correctly adhesive if he doesn’t know—however he is aware of that once you learn his strains you can be “holding me now in hand.” It will get sexier from there on. It’s not solely Whitman’s physique that’s the “electric” conduit for the costs of affection that may adhere the nation; it’s additionally the e book, as an object, which he believes will carry these pulses throughout time and area and into an American future inhabited by the American lovers whom his all-encompassing imaginative and prescient already embraces. Mediation isn’t any barrier to this type of stranger-intimacy.
In Mac’s work, too, written and printed objects transmit not simply information but additionally have an effect on, throughout our bodies and throughout time. Bundles and suspended streams of typed and handwritten written letters are central to Mac’s solo autobiographical play The Young Ladies Of… (2005), which takes its title from a 1968 name for correspondence that his late father despatched out whereas stationed overseas with the U.S. army. In one of many play’s most poignant pictures, Mac’s efficiency as “archival inquirer” takes on the type of a dance with the letters, that are animated by Basil Twist’s puppetry earlier than settling into the form of a wearable gown. If something, our bodies, archival paperwork, and objects are much more firmly and pleasurably entangled within the History. Many of the songs, many of the costumes, and a couple of menu had been reconstructed from analysis the artistic workforce carried out utilizing archival paperwork, a few of which (like Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book, 1871) they take pains to quote straight.
And then there are the mannequins. In a overview of the 24-hour present, Kalle Westerling described the “living costume installation” within the St. Ann’s Warehouse foyer, which designer Machine Dazzle created over the course of the present by dressing 24 mannequins with the costumes that Mac eliminated on the finish of every hour. (The set up subsequently toured to different venues.) Westerling, who emphasizes the ritual features of the efficiency, rightly calls this set up a “reliquary,” stressing the transformational potential of the objects within the set up and those who spectators took away from the theatre. These objects, he argues, “continue to move the performance’s time and space into our everyday lives… Who is to say that the transformation is not still going on?”
It is: I do know it, I really feel it (the ping-pong ball that made its means from the St. Ann’s Warehouse ground to my pocket to an airplane to my desk tells me so), it hasn’t ended, the American utopia we glimpsed in that ecstatic time is feasible, finally, I can by no means un-see what we noticed, we’ll by no means arrive however we have now to maintain going, having felt what we felt we’re simply as Mac stated we had been, saying Whitman’s phrases: “We are insatiate henceforward.”
Jennifer Buckley is affiliate professor of English and theatre arts on the University of Iowa, the place she teaches programs in fashionable and modern drama and efficiency.
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