Lipstick Traces

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century is a play by the Rude Mechanicals performance collective, adapted from Greil Marcus’s 1989 cult classic book. A tangled counter-history, the work traces threads from 16th-century heretics through Dada, the mid-century Lettrists and Situationists, the May ’68 student uprising in Paris, and the birth of punk rock in the UK. Part history lesson, part punk séance, it proposes we locate history not in a linear series of triumphs, but in the traces and detritus left by people hurling themselves against the status quo of their time and place.

Legendary figures like the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten, philosopher Guy Debord, and Dada poet Hugo Ball are snipped from time and fixed into a new frame. The resulting collage is a cacophony of music and manifestos, an assault on sense and the senses. College of the Atlantic students studied and staged the play this winter as part of a the Music and Theatre Production “monster” course, taught by Joanne Woodward & Paul Newman Chair in the Performing Arts Jodi Baker and Darron Asher Collins Chair in Music & Sound Studies Jonathan Henderson.