Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Eric Berryman artfully co-inhabits Black Oral Tradition in GET YOUR ASS IN THE WATER AND SWIM LIKE ME

• By drediman
• January 28, 2024
• No Comments

Earlier this weekend, I ventured down to The Performing Garage in Soho to attend The Wooster Group’s production of Eric Berryman’s Get Your Ass in the Air and Swim Like Me by Eric Berryman. As one of New York’s venerable experimental theater companies, The Wooster Group has long had an obsession with putting on rigorously-minded performances that challenge audiences to re-investigate how they perceive the world around them. Berryman’s latest continues in this tradition.

As a companion piece to Berryman’s previous project The B-Side, Get Your Ass in the Air and Swim Like Me also takes its inspiration from a recording by folklorist Bruce Jackson – this time a series of toasts made by Black men whose identities have been lost to the ether of time. In this go around, Berryman seems less interested in directly channeling the LP (as he was in The B-Side) as he is infusing it with his own persona and experience as a Black man. As such, the experience registers less as an anthropological endeavor as it does a personal co-habitation of Black Oral Tradition. For the performance piece, Berryman has chosen seven of Jackson’s recorded toasts, each of which is carefully channeled through the lens of our host’s own complex narrative.

As performed by Berryman and staged by associate director Kate Valk, Swim Like Me is as meticulously and artfully presented as you’d expect from a Wooster Group production. Valk’s production is a sly progression from a sort of laidback late night radio show to a quietly transcendent intermediation of past and present. Throughout, Berryman is accompanied by percussionist Jharis Yokley, whose perfectly calibrated work on the drums brings seductive atmosphere and abundant mood to the proceedings.

RECOMMENDED

GET YOUR ASS IN THE WATER AND SWIM LIKE ME
Off-Broadway, Play
The Wooster Group at The Performance Garage
1 hour (without in intermission)
Through February 3