At the very end of the 24-Hour performance that comprised Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Mac quietly but repeatedly reminded the audience that they have two options—they could either "lie down or get up and play." On the verge of the 2016 election when a sense of collective dread was just beginning to set in among this queer body public, this eerie incantation was nothing short of prescient in announcing an agenda for the creative arts and for the queer performing arts in particular. Just as the AIDS crisis could be said to have sparked new forms of creativity and new forms of aesthetic intervention in (re)setting the normative horizons of our collective imaginary in the 1990s, so too has the age of Trump ushered in, perversely but inexorably, a new sense of urgency to (re)make the performing arts not merely into stages for political theater, but also into collective forums for queer, performative doings. Drawing on prior work in theater history, performance studies, and queer theory both by themselves and by others including José Esteban Muñoz, Rebecca Schneider, and Jill Dolan, this panel will investigate the ways in which queer, creative artists across a variety of performance sites and media are working in this moment to engender new forms of expression not merely to resist the impositions of a white supremacist regime but to catalyze action against it and against the cruelties inflicted upon black, brown, and queer bodies.

Each speaker will present a paper of no more than 18-20 minutes in length in order to allow ample time for questions. An a/v projector will be necessary to share images from the performances discussed. In brief, and in order of their presentation, the papers will be as follows:

David Roman's "Boys to Men: Tarrell Alvin McCraney's Radical Broadway Debut," considers the 2019 Broadway debut of Tarrell Alvin McCraney's Choir Boy, the first Broadway production to feature a black, queer youth as the central protagonist. The play tells the story of a cohort of young, black men at an all-male boarding school and how they respond to the harassment of the play's central protagonist, Pharus, who not only is black, gay, and effeminate but is also the leader of the school choir. The paper explores the ways in which the play foregrounds the connections between faith, race, and sexuality, and examines how McCraney imagines a new generation of black men that will challenge received ideas of their history, culture, and traditions.

Tavia Nyong'o's "Shit-Hole Solidarity: Rethinking Racial Abjection in a Populist Age" discusses the performance and film work of Ela Troyano and Carmelita Tropicana in their speculative fantasy piece "Hybrid Alternos" as an instance of what he terms, in opposition to the excremental vulgarity of the sitting American President, "shit-hole solidarity." Drawing on theoretical accounts of abjection from Julia Kristeva to Darieck Scott, Nyong'o interrogates the ways in which the brown body is figured in this political rhetoric as the abject—animated and humanized excrement— and discusses how performance can enchant this racial abjection with a "shit-hole solidarity" that can re-animate derogated being in the wake of the white supremacist, imperialist show.

Lisa A. Freeman's "Too Slow: Taylor Mac and the Rubs of Time," explores the oscillating tempos of experience that guide Taylor Mac's narrativized, musical performance of the fifteenth decade of his 24-Decade History of Popular Music, which opens with "Happy Days Are Here Again" and ends with a hushed reading of the final pages of James Joyce's Ulysses. Drawing on and extending the work of Jill Dolan, José Esteban Muñoz, and Elizabeth Freeman, her paper illustrates the "rubs of time" through which Mac not only draws us into the experience of communitas but also thrusts us outward into a space where we are meant to understand that complacency is not an option and that an adamantly queer activism is an absolute imperative.

"We should fall in love with nouns more than verbs," Mac once said at a workshop performance. And with this he exhorted us to enter into an embrace of the profoundly activist, performative doings that our panel will explore in the emergent, queer performances of our age.