Being asked to 'embrace the discomfort' might seem a strange way to sell this year's climactic event of the Belfast International Arts festival, but with Taylor Mac, whose glitterball face has adorned both festival posters and the front of programmes, we expect the unexpected.
Saturday night's event promised an extract from the artist's normally day long 24 decade History of Popular Music, with added local and topical elements. In the event it was more a celebration of late twentieth century gold standard songs which also formed a kind of tribute act in its own right.
Looking like a car crash between Lady Gaga and Charles 11, Taylor Mac upped the fabulousness from the start, with a blistering 'Born to Run' taking us out onto the mean streets. Trump. gay marriage, and duplicitous cakes were duly dispensed with, as was the frankly disturbing notion that he might indeed be the love child of The Donald and Hillary Clinton.
Mac is of course a seasoned spinner of yarns with an acute sense of history. He managed to almost professorially deconstruct Nina Simone's Civil rights anthem 'Mississippi Goddam' in between delivering its inflammatory verses.
Bit it's as a sexual agent provocateur that Taylor Mac shows his uniqueness. Who else would deliberately sabotage right wing gun nut Ted Nugent's agenda by turning one of his songs into a gay love-in with the whole audience on stage in the arms of a member of the same sex?
We were then treated to an anguished version of 'the greatest make out song in history' Prince's 'Purple rain'. Coupled with a version of Bowie's Heroes in which the ulleann pipe work of traditional musicians 'Rellta' stood in for Robert Fripp's histrionic guitar work, it was a reminder of what we've sadly lost this year. But Mac, by turns winsome and confrontational, worked the audience like his own instrument, with the communal take on Laurie Anderson's 'O superman' a particularly striking finale.
It's a cheering thought in dark times that a show which emphasizes gender fluidity and the joys of casual sex can send an audience humming and giggling into the night as effectively as a pantomime. Truly the counterculture is safe in his/her hands.
