Queer Maximalism  x Machine Dazzle

Edited by Elissa Auther  Texts by Mike Albo, Elissa Auther, Mx. Justin Vivian Bond, Sally Gray, Taylor Mac, Machine Dazzle, madison moore, David Román and Kalle Westerling

Rizzoli/Electa, New York 2022, 160 pages, 23 x 28 cm, Hardcover, ISBN  978-0-8478-6967-1

euro 48,00

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Machine Dazzle is the much-in-demand designer and artist behind popular cabaret, drag, and performance stars such as Taylor Mac and transgender icon Mx. Justin Vivian Bond. For the first time, his over-the-top stage creations, made for himself and others, are collected here alongside stage environments, ephemera, and photos from his career. In Machine Dazzle’s world, costumes are transformative objects with world-making capacity. The artist’s “queer maximalism” encapsulates a more-is-better attitude to making and creating, which looks to counter elitist notions that spectacle and extravagance are vapid. For him, these associations are embraced as queer for their affirmation of hybridity and the rejection of hierarchies of every kind. On the occasion of a major exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design, curator Elissa Auther brings together an expansive collection of essays and reminiscences from fellow performers, historians, and cultural critics that consider every aspect of Machine Dazzle’s rich body of work.

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I have two things to tell you about the streamed version of Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce...Pandemic!, which went live on December 12 and is available on-demand until January 2: one, streaming is amazing, and two, streaming sucks.

Amazing because it gives us access to a broad array of theatrical content that we simply can’t access in the usual way, thanks to COVID. Every day it seems more plays and musicals and operas can be enjoyed in the comfort and safety of our homes, out of reach (we hope!) of the virus.

On the other hand, streaming sucks, for the simple reason that it is a very poor simulation of live theatre, both for the performers, and for we in the audience. Worst of all, it almost completely severs the connection between audience and performers. The joy of laughing along with your fellow theatergoers, the way actors and singers subtly adapt their performances based on the audience’s reactions, the sense of being present for a one-time-only experience...all that is lost when theaters are shuttered and an interactive, fully-dimensional experience is confined within a two-dimensional rectangle.

I was fortunate enough to attend Mac’s first incarnation of Holiday Sauce when it opened at the Curran back in 2018. That wild night was a glorious celebration of family - specifically, the families queer people create when our own relations can not, or will not, accept us as we are. We laughed, some of us cried, we stood and sang along, and we gloried in the stunning staging and costumes created by Mac’s partner in art, Machine Dazzle.

This iteration is remarkably similar to what was staged at the Curran, though different enough that it qualifies as a new show.

The first 20 minutes or so are simply a casual monologue by Mac, costumed as you see in the photo above, a human centerpiece on a groaning board of a holiday table. Despite the splendor of the costuming and backdrop, this opening has a very laid-back, casual vibe. Mac asks us to leave the outside world behind, put down our phones, and enter the world that he asked his design team to “make it look like a public access show on LSD.” Mac looks around a moment, then turns back to camera and shouts “Success!” 

Once the show proper begins, Mac leads off with a version of the classic Christmas hymn “O Holy Night,” which he stops - again and again - to reframe the Christianist, patriarchal lyrics toward a more progressive (and queer) sensibility. He changes none of the lyrics, merely asking us to think of “holy” and “sin” and “fall on your knees” in very different ways. At the live show, after the first run-through of the song, Mac got us all to sing along and perform the gestures judy (Mac uses “judy” as judy’s personal pronoun) had just taught us. For the stream, however, Mac invited Thornetta Davis (the “queen of Chicago blues) to perform a sincere version of the song - which she does so powerfully, and with such commitment that it alone is worth the $10 Mac is charging as a streaming fee. (For that you also get a version of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” as a power ballad with metal overtones.)

Other guests pop in: a range of queer performers and drag queens add their unique takes on the holidays, Machine Dazzle appears as a Christmas tree presenting a self-affirmation, and Steffanie Christi’an gives a lovely rendition of Bill Withers’s “Grandma’s Hands.”

There are some very dark moments in Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce...Pandemic! (grandma in a pool of her own urine, as well as some rather painful recollections of Christmases past), but these are used sparingly, and as a way of reminding us of our power as individuals to craft our own narratives about our lives. “Free from family obligations, subjugation - now I just hang out with all my queery peers and my chosen grandmas and grandpas.”

Taylor Mac

Gender: Non binary (judy as pronoun)

Sexuality: Queer

DOB: 24 August 1973  

Ethnicity: White

Occupation: Actor, playwright, performance artist, director, producer, singer, songwriter

Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus by Taylor Mac