Театр The Wooster Group использует виниловые пластинки как ключевой элемент сценографии в новой постановке

The Wooster Group “More than just a carrier of recorded sound”: The Wooster Group's use of vinyl July 2026 Giles Bailey investigates the New York experimental theatre company's use of vinyl records in their latest production, Nayatt School Redux The first time I saw The Wooster Group work with vinyl records was at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in October 2016, where the longstanding New York experimental theatre company were mounting their piece Early Shaker Spirituals. It was a masterful, spare performance where a 1976 LP of the same name by the Sisters Of The Shaker Community in Sabbathday Lake, Maine, is played in its entirety. A performer introduces the record, then places it on a turntable visible to the side of the stage and lowers the needle. Four older women in traditional Shaker attire – Elizabeth LeCompte, Suzzy Roche, Frances McDormand, and Cynthia Hedstrom – then present a series of dances and sing with the unaccompanied voices of the women on the recording. This is punctuated by pauses where liner notes are read and then the record is turned over. When side two begins, the women are joined by four men in their thirties who dance with them until the album is complete. The work is austere and tender, taking the artefact of the LP and expanding its modest status into a live event. It spins and activates an embodied response to the history of the devout, celibate, primitivist Christian sect that celebrates its magic and its strangeness. The Shaker women’s music is a stirring engine for a performance driven by the liveness of a needle as it rides along a microscopic groove, translating its ridges into electrical impulses which are amplified to become sound. I was aware of this recurring device from reading about early Wooster Group works. The dance piece Hula (1981) uses a similar process with an LP by The Waikiki Hula Boys, this time with performers clad only in grass skirts and leis and marking the work’s ending by urinating together. The incarcerated singers documented on the 1965 LP Negro Folklore From Texas State Prisons are channeled through earpieces worn by performers Eric Berryman, Jasper McGruder and Philip Moore in The B-Side (2016). Other albums feature in Get Your Ass In The Water And Swim Like Me (2026) and LSD (…Just The High Points…) (1983), but the work where records spin with the most frequency and complexity is Nayatt School from 1978, recently reanimated by the company in April this year at London's Coronet Theatre as Nayatt School Redux. Witnessing the piece with its many turntables positioned across the set producing a dynamic collage of sound throughout prompted questions about how a performance like this might make us think about the vinyl LP as more than just a carrier of recorded sound. I was left reflecting on how it might be a special tool for performance-making, introducing new potential for listening as part of a work of theatre. In Nayatt School Redux, founding member of the group Kate Valk evokes the original production by delivering its opening monologue by her late friend and collaborator Spalding Gray. Newly restored video documentation and an audio recording so poor that voices are little more than suggestions of speech buried in textures of noise and hum play alongside her accounts of how the work came together, experiences of performers and Kate’s own journey to becoming part of the ensemble. She explains how Spalding would play extracts from records chosen from his collection as part of this introductory section, driving content together in incongruous combinations. At the heart of the performance is a 1950 cast recording of TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party starring Alec Guinness and Irene Worth, a play from which scenes are later acted out in an unhinged fashion by the Wooster Group cast. This is set against sections from Arch Oboler’s Drop Dead! An Exercise In Horror! and eruptions of Cerrone’s disco epic “Love In C Minor”. When I spoke with Kate Valk about the process of making Early Shaker Spirituals after the performance in Paris, she explained, “In the early 1980s, our record collection was the ancient equivalent of the internet. We would come together as a group and there might be a text that for one reason or another came to the centre of the group… So we’d have a text and then it would always be like, ‘Get the records out!’” She went on to describe how the company’s director, Elizabeth LeCompte, would often begin the devising of a new work with an imagined architecture for the space. “Then,” she said, “we’d just start jamming: read the text, play the records… It’s like every era has its medium and at that time, people were really into vinyl!” Records are woven through Nayatt School Redux and the act of putting LPs onto turntables is part of the performance. Their materiality is consciously underlined. Much as Kate Valk emphasised when we talked, saying, “The idea of the record – yes, it’s the soundtrack, yes, it’s the primary source of material, and it’s also a visual element and artefact.” It leaves the audience with audio to interpret, an image to read and a tangible sense of sound inscribed into an object, drawing attention to how, like the histories being studied in the piece, the records are rarified, special and fragile. In the closing section of the performance at the Coronet, the frenzy has died down and Kate Valk shares her memory of how Nayatt School ended in its original incarnation with the destruction of the records. She explains how lit matches were thrown at them as they turned, performer Libby Howes reached down her dress to grip a turntable arm and scratch it suggestively against the vinyl, Ron Vawter took off his clothes and attempted to use his penis as a stylus. It sounds like a moment of alarming and transgressive catharsis. As this account is given and Scott Shepherd shuffled to the back of the stage with a record player in his hands and trousers round his ankles in an echo of Spalding Gray back in 1978, I recalled the strict instruction I was given as a child about the care necessary in taking an LP from its sleeve and repeat with second nature today each time I play one. Nayatt School Redux’s disobedience, in terms of handling both records and histories, is a prompt to consider why either might be deemed precious. It activates bodies across time and inflects them in different ways with music and sound. For the collective 60 minute duration of the piece, the audience is invited on that journey too. Leaving the theatre, I couldn’t help but think about how histories degrade, skip, or play, with beautiful, momentary clarity. I thought too about how I might come to accept or even cherish accumulated dust in the grooves or the unique smear of fingers for the singular liveness of the resulting pops, crackles and jumps. Comments As these performances and articles keep coming up, I can't help but keep asking and encouraging writers to ASK the artists and production companies involved -- why are you not involving the living people that you are portraying? That is a conscience decision at this point -- why? And why continue to make money off of a living culture that is struggling without some sort of give back to that community? Sabbathday Lake Shakers are still active and are still singing these songs as worship, not as play.