In 2016, Taylor Mac performed a one-time-only, 24-hour immersive theatrical experience in front of a live audience at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. The concert offered an alternative take on U.S. history, narrated through music that was popular from the nation’s founding to the present, with Mac transforming hourly by changing into elaborate, decade-specific costumes by Mac’s longtime collaborator Machine Dazzle. The HBO documentary directed by Oscar-winning filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music, captures Mac’s marathon performance in New York, alongside footage from other shows on the tour, which played throughout the world, and interviews that offer insight into its creation. In the show, Mac and 24 musicians interpret 24 decades of songs, from “Yankee Doodle” to “Gimme Shelter,” “Born to Run” and “Gloria,” with one performer leaving the stage each hour, until Mac is on stage alone in the final 24th hour.
With Emmy voting now underway and Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music streaming on Max, Machine Dazzle speaks exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about his collaboration with Taylor Mac.
Before we get on to 24-Decade History, could you give me a brief history of your working relationship with Taylor Mac?
Machine Dazzle: “It was around 2001 when I first met Taylor Mac. I was a dazzle dancer, we were strippers predominantly in queer spaces in New York, like The Cock and High Life/Low Life. One night, I was standing naked at a bar covered in glitter redeeming my drink ticket and Taylor came up to me and introduced himself. His whole face was painted white, he was literally wearing garbage and holding a ukulele, and we fell in love! After that, he started inviting the dazzle dancers and me to do special events. Taylor’s a community organizer and he would organize things at P.S. 122 back in the day and at HERE performing arts center and we started working together like sisters in nightlife.”
“One day he came to me and said, ‘Hey, would you make me a lily costume?’ And I was like, ‘Okay!’ So I made him a lily costume. I didn’t know what it was for, I just knew that he had this lily costume and that he was traveling all over the place workshopping something. Then he told me that he was doing something with 40 performers and five directors over five hours. That ended up being our first real collaboration, The Lily’s Revenge: A Flowergory Manifold at HERE in 2009. About a year after that, he came to me and was like, ‘Hey, we’re doing another show at La Mama, Walk Across America for Mother Earth, and asked me to do the costumes. That was a really interesting piece about activists who walked from New York to a nuclear power plant in Nevada, and even though their hearts were in the right place, it talks about how people who are doing the right thing can also do bad things.”
“Then one day when he was abroad, Taylor sent me a message saying, ‘Machine, would you make me a 1790s inspired outfit?’ I didn’t know where this was going at the time. It was for a magazine photo shoot and then he wore it for a show at Joe’s Pub that I wasn’t able to go to. A year later, he came back to me and was like, ‘Machine, would you make me a 1930s inspired outfit? Oh, and make a 1970s inspired outfit while you’re at it!’ So I made them and he came over to my house for a fitting and walked away with them. He did another workshop with those decades at Joe’s Pub and then he laid it on all me, what his vision was.”
“At that time, I had a full-time day job as a jewelry designer in the Garment District in New York. On my lunch break one day Taylor showed up and he was like, ‘Okay, we are going to do 24 different decades’, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I get to do 24 different period costumes my way?! Sign me up!’ So that’s when I started and the next outfit he needed was 1770s inspired. I didn’t have the big picture yet, but I just started doing it and having ideas for all these different decades and then I found my recipe. Every time I do a show, there’s a recipe for the way I do the costumes for that particular show which makes it cohesive and keeps it interesting and original.”
“As Taylor was workshopping more decades, I started getting in drag and being part of those workshops. By the time we went on tour, I was not only designing and making the costumes, but I was part of the show and needed to become part of the touring schedule. I couldn’t say no to that part of my life anymore so although things were tight I had to I quit my day job. I gave them three months notice and we went on tour in January of 2016. We workshopped up until we put it all together at St. Ann’s Warehouse for the 24-hour show. It was some of the work that I’m most proud of in my life. We made it through and we toured it all over the world. The costumes from 24-Decade History have been exhibited in museums and people are still interested in them now.”
“Since then, we did The Fre at the Flea Theatre together, which was cut short because of COVID, and The Hang at HERE which Taylor was growing his beard out for a year and a half for to play Socrates. That was a little jazz opera about living a virtuous life in an unvirtuous world. We also did Whitman in the Woods, which was this initiative from ALL ARTs in the summer of 2020 when everything was shut down. We were all masked, apart from Taylor, and he was reciting Walt Whitman poetry outdoors in nature. I made him all of these looks which was fun and that project kind of saved my life because I was really going through it at that moment. I’d just left a relationship and I was on unemployment for the first time in my life at 49.”
“The whole time that we were doing those shows I knew Bark of Millions was coming, so I was there from the beginning of that. We’ve done three different tours with that show and the next one will be Berlin in October. I have all of the costumes for Bark of Millions right here in my studio because as we lead up to Berlin I’m still working on them. The costumes are actually living sculptures, I continue to work on them, to add to them and improve them. As long as we’re touring the show, the costumes are alive and subject to change. That’s what I did when we were doing 24-Decade too.”
“Taylor is a dream collaborator. He’s a chameleon and he lets me do whatever I want. He tells me what he’s doing and then I come up with something and he trusts me to do it. It’s a very special relationship because that’s not usually how it happens. Some people like to be in control of their image, but I think that me and Taylor naturally have a similar aesthetic going on. When I make costumes for myself it looks like a Taylor Mac costume because I make Taylor’s costumes.”
You mentioned coming up with a recipe, what was the particular recipe that you came up with for creating the costumes for 24-Decade History?
“When we were first workshopping the shows, a decade at a time, it was in spaces that were not particularly theatrical, they were more like listening rooms because the music is what really hits. You couldn’t have scenery or props, so it came to be that when Taylor got up on stage to represent an entire decade, the visual element came from the costumes. They had what I call historical texture. There were details of things that were happening during that decade that might have nothing to do with the songs, but were there for the sake of history and creating queer space. The costume was the set and it had all of the props on it. So it became this very maximal thing that people could easily pick apart and find the stories that I was telling alongside the stories that Taylor was telling. The costumes became very sculptural and I used specific materials to do specific things.”
“It’s more than just the music, because we already have what Taylor is saying with that, so with the costumes it was about what I could add to that experience with historical references. I’d start each one by asking, ‘What was going on in that decade? What was new? What was invented at the time? What were people excited about? Who was the President at the time?” Those were the kind of things that I would put into the costumes. I did a lot of my own research and sometimes the music guided me as to what kind of research I did and I was always relating it back to what we were doing with the show, creating queer space. I’m an artist, I’m not a formally trained costume designer and I’ve never taken a sewing class in my life. I’ve never taken a music class or a scenic design class either, but this is how I make my living these days and I love it. I have a specific way of doing things to the point that people can tell if I made a costume or not.”
The HIV/AIDS crisis is integral to 24-Decade History. The impetus for the piece was Taylor’s experience of going to the first San Francisco AIDS Walk as a teenager in 1987 and, as we see in the film, every hour during the 24-hour version of the show a band member symbolically leaves the stage and does not return. When it came to the design of the 1980s costume what was your approach?
“What everybody was waiting for with this show was how we were going to handle music that was more current that we’re all familiar with. When I came to the 1980s outfit, I took cues from my own personal experience. I didn’t have to do research about it because I had lived it. I remember there being a lot of spandex and very body conscious and asymmetrical things around. So I made a body suit. I remember things being very graphic and that early video games like Pac Man and Space Invaders were very pixelated, so I wanted didn’t want anything that was too refined.”
“Thinking about the music, I remembered there being a lot of a heavy spiritual undertones, and maybe even overtones, in pop music during that time. I remember when Enigma came out with music using the Gregorian chant and giving it this kind of techno disco beat, that was very popular and on the cover there was this hooded figure, like a monk. So I wanted Taylor in a robe, in something that was devotional and spiritual. We were bathing in and nurturing ourselves with music during the 80s and I still had all of my cassettes from when I was growing up. I sacrificed them all for the outfit and I took them all apart and I got all of the tape out and that became the wig. Then I had this whole shroud made out of the cassette tapes which were all linked together. It wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t a comfortable decade. Taylor had white high heeled shoes on with little green pom-poms on them that represented the white blood cells being attacked by the HIV virus.”
“When I think of the 80s, I remember very graphic neon things like my Trapper Keeper, this vinyl folder from grade school that I was using at a time when I was being bullied and called faggot and queer for the first time. That inspired these amazing gloves with long nails. Then for the topper, I had belts with cartridges to hold these wooden dowels and floating above Taylor is this big cloud made out of skulls and they’re crying, so it’s a raining on your parade kind of thing. It was actually very dark and Taylor doesn’t really like wearing black, which I understand, but I thought this was a good decade for that. It was also the decade when I was sent off the stage.”
“The AIDS decade costume was about loss and it was definitely a little more spare than the others. Something that we’re doing with the show is deconstructing American history, we’re trying to acknowledge everything that happened and also insert a queer narrative. So I’d put something on him and then after a few songs Taylor would take off a layer. The first thing to come off in that decade was the clouds and then the robe of cassettes came off, so then he was in some demented 80s music video look; this tight, asymmetrical body suit, with this messy hair made out of all of the cassette tape. It’s one of my favorite looks and one that I’m the most proud of actually. It was not easy to wear, but considering what we were dealing with at that time, that seemed appropriate.”
By James Kleinmann
Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music is streaming on Max.
