The Wooster Group Early Shaker Spirituals: A Record Album Interpretation

The newest Wooster Group work, Early Shaker Spirituals: A Record Album Interpretation is a performance based on a 1976 LP of Shaker hymns, marches, anthems, and testimony recorded by Sister R. Mildred Barker and the sisters of the Shaker community in Sabbathday Lake, Maine.

Early Shaker Spirituals features performances of all twenty tracks from side A of the album sung by Cynthia Hedstrom, Elizabeth LeCompte, Frances McDormand, and Suzzy Roche. The performers channel the voices of the Shaker singers to give a new live rendering of the songs. Complementing the songs are dances created by the Group. They are composed of simple patterns inspired by the surviving fragments of the ecstatic dance that characterized the Shakers’ worship services. For the dances, the singers are joined by Matthew Brown, Modesto Jimenez, Bobby McElver, Bebe Miller and Andrew Schneider. Jamie Poskin reads from the album liner notes.