Early Shaker Spirituals

In Early Shaker Spirituals, The Wooster Group channels the 1976 LP of the same name recorded by the Sisters of the Shaker Community in Sabbathday Lake, Maine, giving a new live rendering to their songs and finding inspiration for a series of dances.

Early Shaker Spirituals returns to an artistic practice that the Group has used throughout its history: working with record albums as source material for original productions, among them Hula (1981) and L.S.D. (…Just The High Points…) (1984). The piece also expresses the Group’s long-standing interest in the Shakers, a millenarian, celibate, communitarian sect. In 1980, Elizabeth LeCompte, Kate Valk and other members of the company visited the Sabbathday Lake Shaker community and met with Sister R. Mildred Barker. Around that time, the company first began listening to the record album that forms the basis for this piece.