Drag acts are hardly front page news these days, but when New York performance artist and actor Taylor Mac dons a feather boa, false eyelashes and a wig, it makes his ukulele playing even more striking. Especially when the songs he sings are no Tiny Tim style novelty, but are torch ballad litanies of love and loss in the Big Apple, where, as a gay artist, it’s easy to be an outsider.
Audiences caught a taste of that at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, when The Be(a)st Of Taylor Mac scooped a Bank Of Scotland Herald Angel Award. Mac’s solo compendium of songs and monologues returns next week for a short late-night stint as part of The Arches Theatre Festival following a sold out run at Soho Theatre in London.
“It took 13 years for me to find an audience,” Mac says inbetween shows, “but as soon as I came to Edinburgh it just took me three weeks. This show is quite small and personal, but I also do these big ensemble shows, but they’re quite a pain to put on. The Be(a)st Of Taylor Mac is quite intimate in that way.”
Part of that is its subject matter, which outlines a freakshow who could have stepped out of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Instead of white light and white heat, however, Taylor Mac has his ukulele.
“It’s a very uncool instrument,” he says. “Very vulnerable. Onstage I’m this great big creature in drag, so to have this counterpoint is really important. It’s important too that the show is done in the way it is. If there’s more than 1000 people at a show, it ceases to become theatre, and becomes spectacle instead. That’s fine, but I see myself working more at grassroots level, as the sort of community activist who believes in social change of which there were a lot of in the 60s. If I perform for 150 people in a small room, maybe people’s lives will be changed in some small way. Spectacle doesn’t have that sense of community.”
Mac ‘dabbles’ in legitimate theatre, but in The Be(a)st Of Taylor Mac and other works has developed an ethos that can be rooted in his suburban upbringing.
“There,” he says, “anything slightly different was ridiculed, and anything that attracted attention to itself was abused. My work is responding to that. It’s not just about being queer, but is about a whole alternative lifestyle. You used to be born into the counter-culture, where people living alternative lifestyles or where transvestites or whatever bought vintage clothing because they couldn’t afford to buy anything else. Now it’s been appropriated, and people shop at Gap and wear Birkenstocks, so it’s become a lifestyle choice. You have to work a little harder to be part of the counter-culture these days, because it’s just not cool My work is a kind of monument to that, and its quite complex to do that without praise or blame. Appropriation is so fast these days that you just have to live in the moment. I might think gluing things onto my made up face is a brand new idea, but then I think of Leigh Bowery, and I see he got there first.”
The Be(a)st Of Taylor Mac, The Arches, Glasgow, April 12-14, 10pm; www.taylormac.net
The Herald, April 3rd 2007
ends
Audiences caught a taste of that at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, when The Be(a)st Of Taylor Mac scooped a Bank Of Scotland Herald Angel Award. Mac’s solo compendium of songs and monologues returns next week for a short late-night stint as part of The Arches Theatre Festival following a sold out run at Soho Theatre in London.
“It took 13 years for me to find an audience,” Mac says inbetween shows, “but as soon as I came to Edinburgh it just took me three weeks. This show is quite small and personal, but I also do these big ensemble shows, but they’re quite a pain to put on. The Be(a)st Of Taylor Mac is quite intimate in that way.”
Part of that is its subject matter, which outlines a freakshow who could have stepped out of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Instead of white light and white heat, however, Taylor Mac has his ukulele.
“It’s a very uncool instrument,” he says. “Very vulnerable. Onstage I’m this great big creature in drag, so to have this counterpoint is really important. It’s important too that the show is done in the way it is. If there’s more than 1000 people at a show, it ceases to become theatre, and becomes spectacle instead. That’s fine, but I see myself working more at grassroots level, as the sort of community activist who believes in social change of which there were a lot of in the 60s. If I perform for 150 people in a small room, maybe people’s lives will be changed in some small way. Spectacle doesn’t have that sense of community.”
Mac ‘dabbles’ in legitimate theatre, but in The Be(a)st Of Taylor Mac and other works has developed an ethos that can be rooted in his suburban upbringing.
“There,” he says, “anything slightly different was ridiculed, and anything that attracted attention to itself was abused. My work is responding to that. It’s not just about being queer, but is about a whole alternative lifestyle. You used to be born into the counter-culture, where people living alternative lifestyles or where transvestites or whatever bought vintage clothing because they couldn’t afford to buy anything else. Now it’s been appropriated, and people shop at Gap and wear Birkenstocks, so it’s become a lifestyle choice. You have to work a little harder to be part of the counter-culture these days, because it’s just not cool My work is a kind of monument to that, and its quite complex to do that without praise or blame. Appropriation is so fast these days that you just have to live in the moment. I might think gluing things onto my made up face is a brand new idea, but then I think of Leigh Bowery, and I see he got there first.”
The Be(a)st Of Taylor Mac, The Arches, Glasgow, April 12-14, 10pm; www.taylormac.net
The Herald, April 3rd 2007
ends
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