Hope is the thing with feathers

Taylor Mac has a gift for turning accepted perspectives on their head. The actor, playwright, performance artist, director, producer, and singer-songwriter views the world with a playful but acutely challenging eye, making his work daring, provocative — and spectacular. He can arguably add philosopher to his numerous credentials. 

Mac is a Schwarzman Centre Cultural Fellow for 2025/26, in partnership with Mansfield College, and he says this has become “a delightful way to dig into my spiritual practice of wondering as prayer” enabling him to slow his racing mind and “go at the pace of consideration.” Despite having no aspirations to belong to academia, he has a love of learning and says he has relished meeting the “wonderful thinkers” at Oxford. 

Perhaps unwittingly, he fits in well; his often galloping mind spends a lot of time contemplating the human condition. 

Mac believes the almost universal need to be seen is a reaction to being pitted against each other in a capitalist society, fuelling a certain desperation. Yet joy lies in coming together, hence his love of giant ensemble shows, including his latest, Bark of Millions. “When you make space for other people, you make space for yourself.” 

He maintains that conventional society isn’t happy, yet the instinct to settle for what is conventional and accepted stems from an innate need to belong, something borne out by a primal need to find our ‘tribe’. 

“There’s a lot of emphasis in our culture about being seen. But I question whether it’s really that we want to be seen — is it more, how can we take the time to actually see other people?” 

For Mac, belonging is action. It is about not simply taking refuge in the company of people who share your core values but instead, opening your heart. He tackles this belief head on in his work, using art to break down barriers and giving people the imagination and confidence to rebuild in a more positive way. 

In his seminal 24-Decade History of Popular Music, a spectacular queer history of the US from the 1700s to the present, he asked the audience to slow dance with someone of the same gender. “I watched the audiences giggle and not take it seriously. I had to dig in with them and keep asking them to examine what that nervous energy was about. Is it internalised homophobia? Is it homophobia?” The act made the audience feel exposed but also proved cathartic and moving. 

Being brave enough to ask someone to dance is a powerful metaphor for opening your mind and your heart and supports Mac’s belief that everyone has a right to be here. “You belong because you exist,” he says, simply. “You don’t have to ask for permission.” 

People find belonging in many ways, not least in friendship, something Mac talks about passionately. But with love and friendship comes vulnerability, and grief is the flipside of losing someone inextricably linked with an individual’s sense of belonging. 

Yet he has a way of reasoning with loss. “Mother Earth is resurrecting every single freaking day. So that’s not to deny that you don’t grieve, but immortality is like belonging; the more we tell stories of the past, the more they live.” 

"We don’t have this homogenous kind of ‘my tribe, your tribe’ because we feel like we belong. People who hunker down into their tribe are exposing their desperation; they’re exposing their loneliness.” 

There is an irrepressible and irresistible joy and shrewdness to Mac’s outlook. Being in his company means reevaluating unconscious biases and lazy presuppositions. His response to embracing drag and ‘theatrical excess’ typifies this. “I think of drag as nature. There’s nothing straight in nature, everything’s wobbly, curved. When I hear words like ‘excess’, I think, ‘you mean ‘natural’.” 

He describes drag as like reaching for nature and for both those who are lost and present: “it is a giant invitation to the world to come closer.” That’s not to say that drawing attention to something less usual is purely positive. “I’ve had guns pointed at me because I was wearing high heeled shoes walking down the street. I’ve been sucker punched multiple times because I was in drag. 

“But as my late drag Mother, Mother Flawless Sabrina, would say, ‘Oh, they just want to be part of the show’, because they actually did come closer.” 

There it is again — the perspicacity that turns adversity into opportunity; hate into love. 

Bark of Millions, an electrifying live performance by Taylor Mac and Matt Ray takes place at the Schwarzman Centre on 12 and 13 June 2026, with free screenings of 24-Decade History of Popular Music showing from 5 – 14 June 2026.