Radical Lesbian Chic

Friday’s show (and post-show party) reportedly featured the star bantering with State Sen. Ted Kennedy Jr. about the nature of ​“anal pussy.” Or so Taylor Mac related in Saturday’s show, where there were even more of-the-moment references: ​“Darlene Love is playing down the street… and here we are.”

One of the most ballyhooed events of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Taylor Mac’s The 1990s, held both its performances in the fest’s opening weekend.

Decked out in an exquisite outfit of torn plaid shirts, red clitoris-shaped wings, and an electric wig — later jettisoned in favor of strapped-on bare female breasts, body paint, and denim cut-offs — Taylor Mac sang. Taylor Mac talked. Taylor Mac cavorted. Taylor Mac comforted, discomforted, and recomforted the audience. Taylor Mac veered from torch-song subtlety to folk-pop lyrical sensitivity to ballsy punk delirium. ​“Where are my lesbians?” Taylor Mac asked, and, locating two at once, brought them onstage to serve as back-up singers, breathing heavily in rhythm as added percussion to one of the songs.

Taylor Mac ruled.

Taylor Mac transcends and defies any labels put upon Taylor Mac shows. This one took on a concert format, with a rock band (plus trumpet) backing the vocalist on stylish remakes of standards from the ​“radical lesbian” songbook. That’s what The 1990s means to Taylor Mac: sexual and social revolutionaries such as the writer Sarah Schulman (whose Dyke Manifesto for the Lesbian Avengers was recited in its entirety) and musicians as diverse as Tribe 8, Bitch and Animal, Indigo Girls, Ferron, Lauryn Hill, and, in a triumphant audience-participation encore number, Patti Smith. (No matter that Smith’s ​“People Have the Power” was released in 1988, or that Smith does not identify as lesbian.)

Taylor Mac established from the get-go that The 1990s would be idiosyncratic and unrestrained. The band gamely vamped behind the star’s long nonmusical segments, until occasionally allowed to take a break. These spoken segments were extensive and freewheeling, yet cogent and engrossing. They involved everything from sexual politics to the ​“freaking gauche” qualities of excessive wealth to a long discourse on various types of ​“pussies” and how we all have them.

The 1990s will become one part of a much, much longer show, a projected 24-hour entertainment with a rotating cast of musicians and Taylor Mac taking center stage for the entire time. The project is called A 24-Decade History of the Popular Music, and each hour will evoke a different era. The full 24-Decade History will contain hundreds of songs, and as an added bonus, will chart the deterioration of the performer during the day-long performance.

The world premiere performances of The 1990s at Arts & Ideas lasted over an hour and a half, an exhausting evening in itself. It was an ideal show to kick off the 20th anniversary of the festival. All the bands whose songs were covered in the concert played in New Haven at some point in the ​‘90s, whether at the Tune Inn or Toad’s Place or Cafe Nine or Rudy’s or various Yale colleges. There were references to the last time Taylor Mac appeared at the Yale University Theatre, in 2010 as part of the Yale School of Drama’s No Boundaries series. Umbrage had been taken at the series’ title, apparently, because Taylor Mac feels ​“I have boundaries.” Not enough for the smattering of audience members who walked out during the ​“pussy” monologues, but more than some of the performance artists Taylor Mac has seen, such as the woman who pulled a couple of chicken bones, and then the rest of the entire cooked chicken, out of her vagina, ate it, and threw the carcass out in the audience. Seeing that, ​“I thought two things,” Taylor Mac confided. ​“One: She’s full. And two: She has no boundaries.”

There may not have been a surfeit of radical lesbian theorists at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in the ​‘90s, and the bands Taylor Mac was paying tribute to — in soaring vocals that in most cases surpassed the singing abilities of the original artists — may have had to settle for venues other than Yale theaters or public greens for their New Haven concerts. But the festival has nonetheless been supportive of gender-themed performances and of provocative performance art for its entire 20-year history. The 1990s undoubtedly unnerved some patrons, but it made many others question how they see and label and accept people. Arts & Ideas deserves a lot of credit for making Taylor Mac’s The 1990s a key commissioned piece, and the first big event, of its 2015 festival.

As Taylor Mac put it at the end of Saturday’s extraordinary remembrance to the ​‘90s — the decade when the festival began: ​“The Festival of Arts & Ideas was created 20 years ago by three women. Women who said ​‘We’re going to change things. We’re not going to sit around and ask permission. We’re gonna do it ourselves.” Here’s to all those who keep that tradition alive.