A Hancher co-commission.

Taylor Mac “doesn’t just defy categorization; he makes the categories themselves seem irrelevant” (Time Out New York). For nearly two decades, Mac has created internationally award-winning performance events that at once provoke and embrace his diverse audience. A 24-Decade History of Popular Music is his most ambitious project to date—a subjective history of the past 240 years since America’s founding, told through the music of the times. His look at 1846-1856, Whitman vs. Foster: Songs Popular Near the Breaking Point, is a showdown between Walt Whitman, the Bard of Democracy, and Stephen Foster, the father of American music.

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This event is part of the Just Living theme semester at the University of Iowa.

A 24-Decade History of Popular Music is commissioned in part by Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa; Carole Shorenstein Hays, The Curran SF; Carolina Performing Arts, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA; Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; New Haven Festival of Arts & Ideas; New York Live Arts; OZ Arts Nashville; and University Musical Society of the University of Michigan. This work was developed with the support of the Park Avenue Armory residency program and the 2015 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab at the Sundance Resort. A 24-Decade History of Popular Music was made possible with funding by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Theater Project, with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.