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The Wooster Group and LAPD Go Po-Mo
By Myron Meisel
Photo by Steven Gunther
Is it an oxymoron to speak of “a cappella karaoke?” Yet that’s what New York’s durable The Wooster Group performs in its return to REDCAT with a “record album interpretation” of the fabled 1976 Rounder Records release featuring Sister R. Mildred Barker and the United Society of Shakers of Sabbathday Lake, Maine. Well, Side “A” anyway, the flip side in this 50-minute presentation remains unsung.
The quintet of severely dressed, trembling women vocalize accompanied only by the intermittent hushed background sound of the original vinyl LP, which was a popular and influential one for the then-new indie label.
The Shaker movement originated in the mid-18th century as a mutation of the Quaker revival in England, which, under the leadership of Mother Ann Lee, who later would incarnate the Messiah redux, emigrated in 1774 to escape persecution and settled eventually in the area of New Lebanon, NY.
Photo by Steven Gunther
“The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing”, characterized by ascetic communal living within principles of valuing traditional gender roles equally (by dint of their conviction that both God and Christ were each dually male and female), claimed 6000 adherents in 18 communities by the 1850s.
A charismatic movement devoid of ostentation except in their possession by the Holy Spirit, the “Shakers” embraced both sexual celibacy and religious ecstasy. They left a legacy, of course, of furniture, handicrafts and architecture, but also thousands of “gift” songs of surpassingly simple beauty (the most famous appropriated by Aaron Copland for Appalachian Spring). However, aside from the album in question, there is little other authentic field recording aside from 1996, when Joel Cohen and his Boston Camerata visited surviving sect members and adapted more of the extant work on two CDs.
As is customary with The Wooster Group, even this minimal action is self-consciously framed, here by a male MC who explains how the company had previously assayed other such Album Interpretations: one based on the pop instrumental kitsch of Hula!, and another concocted from Dr. Timothy Leary’s 1966 spoken word farrago under the performing title of L.S.D.(…Just the High Points…)(1984). Refreshingly, the presentation mostly respects the plain spiritual sisterhood and applies neither irony nor condescension toward their religious commitment and unorthodox beliefs.
Nevertheless, does sincerity alone suffice to achieve actual authenticity? I think not: while the Woosters clearly can identify with the women’s zealous adherence to vocation and their joy in disciplined sacrifice on its behalf, their relative self-effacement in this rather mild bit of conceptual art hardly compares to the innate intensity and fervor of the gift-songs themselves, no matter how accomplished the players may be in projecting an impression of ego-less mimicry. One takes away the impression that it can, after all, be a sin to be simple.
Nor did this viewer find the project remotely revelatory. As someone who bought the record back when it was new (and still has it on the shelf), who continues to listen daily to vinyl on the turntable, and for whom folkloric and ethnographic recordings are a routine part of the home musical experience, there was neither novelty nor totemic power to the invocation of antique sounds or to rehabilitated technology.
Still, The Woosters admirably honor the two basic tenets of good cooking: start with quality stuff, and don’t fuck it up. Even so, I’d sooner recommend downloading the entire album, with twice as many numbers, or rooting out the 1984 Ken Burns documentary on the Shakers, itself barely longer than the Wooster presentation.
Karaoke of a different stripe was on offer with the Los Angeles Poverty Department marking its 30th anniversary with a revival of its long-acclaimed Red Beard/Red Beard this past weekend at Highways. The bona-fides of LAPD’s activist commitment remain beyond doubt, and the intimate Highways space showed off one of LAPD’s signature shows with compelling fervor, even while its artistic goals feel questionable.
Photos (left and above) by Matias Jaskari
Red Beard/Red Beard is played simultaneously by two troupes of ten players to two separate audiences on each side of the space, facing television monitors on which what is perhaps Akira Kurosawa’s greatest film (1965) plays in Japanese without subtitles (for about 110 minutes of its 185 minute length). Those subtitles are acted out by each troupe simultaneously, though rarely synchronously, so one hears the Japanese dialogue, the spoken English by the actors in front of you, and that by the other troupe on the far side of the theater as a sort of reverb effect that by now has become a long standing post-modernist cliché. Periodically, the two troupes rotate places to play to the other audience.
LAPD has always upheld determined diversity in casting, not merely in terms of racial or ethnic groups, but also in social outreach, persuasively making the case for Skid Row artistry and culture. It cares not about audience expectations of comfort and usefully stretches our ideas of what professional performance can look like. Notwithstanding, its standards are high, and the entire enterprise maintains a concerted level of engaged passion and consistency of tone. Its primary goal is to expand upon Kurosawa’s achievement by projecting his humanistic values of compassion and recognition that good works require practical guile and considerable inner resources of strength.
The message comes across clearly and effectively, but for most of the performance I inescapably fixated almost entirely on how remarkable the film was, all the better without reading the subtitles, even if the handsome digital rendition of the image was no more than a suggestive simulacrum of the appearance of 35mm film projected on a screen. Although LAPD had more than adequately made its points by the time the show was over, I could not help feeling left out of the remainder of the movie, recalling Kurosawa’s pointed reaction when refusing to truncate his adaptation of The Idiot: “If they (the producers) want to cut it in half, they had better do it lengthwise.”
Early Shaker Spirituals, created by The Wooster Group and directed by Kate Valk, performs at REDCAT, nightly at 8:30 p.m., except for Feb. 1, which is a 3 p.m. performance. https://redcat.org
Red Beard/Red Beard, created by John Malpede of LAPD and directed by Malpede with Henriëtte Brouwers, performed at Highways Performance Space. It is now closed.
