"Austere and profoundly affecting...“Early Shaker Spirituals” testifies joyously to the discipline, dedication and conviction that have allowed one band of artists to endure and flourish on its own uncompromising terms. The show lasts only an hour, yet it seems to span not just decades but centuries of creative evolution and ancestry...What you feel is a true communion of artists with their predecessors."
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"The austerity refreshes like cool water. No text but the record sleeve, no sound but the invocation of long-ago, creaky-voiced Shakers. The women, beautifully severe, don’t even “perform,” beyond looking gravely at the audience. The Wooster gospel has ever been complex, sophisticated and arch. "Early Shaker Spirituals" has such simplicity and vulnerability, I was surprised to find that they’re charging money; it has so much the aura of a proffered gift."
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"Although performed with uncanny exactitude, this experimental musical theater piece is easier to admire than enjoy...This is as austere and unaffected as the spiritual music it reproduces...more intriguing in its conception than execution...The evening soon feels dull and repetitious."
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"What could be the points of connection between an avant-garde performance company and this monastic tradition? Nothing on the surface, but dig deeper and you'll find the same proud insularity, daily commitment to work and openness to the grace of inspiration..."Early Shaker Spirituals," a brief work that could probably be presented as effectively as a theatrical installation in a gallery, reminds us that artists following a true calling are secular saints."
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"It's a strange, defiant, quixotic, fruitless and all-the-more-admirable-for-it evening of entertainment...It lasts one hour and is, appropriately enough, seemingly simple and straightforward in every way. It's purely in the spirit of that strangely memorable religious sect...The evening is not moving in a theatrical sense, but it moves... It was quaint. It was sweet. When can we do it again?"
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"There certainly is beauty in sparseness and simplicity but that doesn’t always make for great theater. The piece seems somewhat purpose-less, uninspired, and frankly, rather dull."
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"Time seems to stop — at least in the normal quotidian sense of its passage. Not just in their songs but in the uncommonly settled, placid presence of the four women in “Early Shaker Spirituals,” we seem transported to a space where temporal concepts no longer apply...I couldn’t say if this is spiritual ecstasy. But it’s transcendent."
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"It is the very austerity and rigorous minimalism of the show that eventually takes hold. Beginning with vaguely familiar hymns that are reminiscent of monodic Appalachian folk songs...With the addition of eerie harmonies and then, in the evening’s finale, reconstructed Shaker dances, "Early Shaker Spirituals" soars beyond a canny ethnomusicological evocation to become something more deeply poignant and wonderfully enchanting."
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