Taylor Mac Discusses the Creation of HBO Documentary “24 Decade History of Music”
Taylor Mac, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated performance artist and playwright, once spent 24 hours on a Brooklyn stage reexamining the American songbook while wearing ornate drag. Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music devoted one hour to each 10-year span since 1776, tracing U.S. history — particularly that of marginalized groups — through a glittering series of vignettes including “Yankee Doodle,” minstrel numbers, the Carousel aria “Soliloquy,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” lesbian anthems from the ’90s, and much, much more. Mac spent six years performing the show in small chunks around the world before mounting it as a one-time endurance test that ranked among 2016’s most acclaimed cultural events.
A mere 650 people got to witness Mac’s feat live, but thanks to Oscar-winning directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt, about the large-scale project that memorialized AIDS victims), it’s been condensed and preserved via HBO. Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music is both a stylish highlight reel and a moving testimonial from the lucky audience that became participants in Mac’s experiment. Epstein and Friedman blend performance footage and interviews with Mac’s collaborators to chronicle the ingenuity that would otherwise be lost to time. Their doc is eligible for an outstanding variety special (prerecorded) Emmy, and Mac tells THR how it came together.
If you’re going to do something this singular and ambitious, how could you not film it and release it?
I’m a theater artist, so I make an ephemeral thing every time. It’s so much about the moment. We did have to ask ourselves questions: Why would it be important to film it? And how can the film be its own piece of art?
What ultimately made you decide to showcase it this way then?
Because the 24-hour show was only being done once, part of the art of the show wasn’t the show itself but the idea that we did it. That’s because throughout our history, queerness has not always been acknowledged. So it was a little bit like demanding that it’d be a historical event. I really wanted the film to be its own art. Why I chose Rob and Jeff, and why they chose me, I think, is because of their legacy. I wanted it to be in conversation with their documentation of queer existence.