Co-Director (with Jodi Baker), Music Director

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century is a play with music by Kirk Lynn and Shawn Sides with Rude Mechs, adapted from Greil Marcus’s 1989 cult classic book. A tangled counter-history, the work follows 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 Richard Huelsenbeck are snipped from time and fixed into a new frame. The resulting collage is a riot of music and manifestos, an assault on sense and the senses.

College of the Atlantic students have studied and staged the play as part of a special topics course in Music and Theatre taught by professors Jodi Baker and Jonathan Henderson.

Photos by Katherine Emery