GET YOUR ASS IN THE WATER AND SWIM LIKE ME

The Wooster Group announces the premiere of Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me, an original work for theater that explores a distinctive genre of Black American storytelling called Toasts. Featuring performer Eric Berryman, the piece is directed by Kate Valk, with production design by Elizabeth LeCompte and sound design by Eric Sluyter. This is the core creative team from the Group’s 2017 production The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” A Record Album Interpretation. For Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me, the team is joined by musician Jharis Yokley and lighting designer Marika Kent. Performances will take place January 11-February 3, 2024, at the Group’s home, The Performing Garage, in New York City.
 
Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me is based on the 1976 LP Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition, which contains a collection of Toasts recorded and edited by folklorist Bruce Jackson. Toasts are rhyming epic poems that tell fantastical and bawdy stories about legendary street heroes, such as Shine (the lone black man on the Titanic), Signifying Monkey, and Pimpin’ Sam. Toasts were staples of urban life for decades, performed by and in groups of men, with each teller introducing his own verbal style and invention. The LP is one of the only archival recordings that survive of this long, rich strain of American folklore.

Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me is set in a late-night radio DJ studio where Berryman, as host, performs renditions of several classic Toasts from the album, which he contextualizes with reflections on Black male identity. He is accompanied by Yokley on drums. This production builds on The Wooster Group’s techniques for animating archival material, bringing the past into the present of live theater. In particular, the Group has a long practice of using record albums both as artifacts and as organizing principles for creating performances, beginning with Nayatt School (1978), Hula (1981), L.S.D. (...Just The High Points…) (1986), and, more recently, Early Shaker Spirituals: A Record Album Interpretation (2014), and The B-Side, based on another LP recorded by Bruce Jackson.
 
The full ensemble for Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me includes: Irfan Brkovic (video design), Andrew Maillet and Yudam Hyung Seok Jeon (additional video), Michaela Murphy (assistant director), Tavish Miller (technical director), Bona Lee (production manager), Monika Wunderer (general manager),  Maya Davis (associate producer), and Cynthia Hedstrom (producer).

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