The writer and performer Taylor Mac spent the first half of the 2010s developing an epic project, “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” that covered 240 years’ worth of American history. Mac would perform large excerpts at concerts, then on Oct. 8-9, 2016, did the whole caboodle as an ultramarathon of 246 songs. The show took over St. Ann’s Warehouse, in Brooklyn, in a 24-hour-long “radical faerie realness ritual sacrifice” that amounted to a transcendent artistic and political gesture. (Full disclosure: I was there.) Key collaborators like the costume designer Machine Dazzle and the makeup artist Anastasia Durasova also explain what went into their many painstakingly intricate creations.

---

Persons: Taylor Mac, Mac, Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman, “ Linda Ronstadt, Anastasia Durasova Organizations: Popular, St, HBO Locations: Ann’s, Brooklyn