Dance | Wooster Square | Arts, Culture & Community
Multidisciplinary musical storytelling group kamrDANCE performs "Addiction." Photos Kapp Singer.
“Addiction” began with a chugging, overdriven vamp on guitar on bass. The energy grew. Soon, staccato clicks started. The dancers’ feet blurred, striking the ground on each downbeat with precision. Tap dancers, a guitarist, bassist, and vocalist moved together across the wooden floor.
On Saturday, choreographer and dancer Alexis Robbins previewed two numbers from “The Mercy Velvet Project,” her experimental musical based on the music of her father, Mark Robbins, and his band Mercy Velvet. The work takes the nine songs from his band’s forgotten record, Live In Vain, and reinterprets them through tap dance. Robbins and the multidisciplinary musical storytelling group she directs, kamrDANCE, performed for an audience of about 80 people in the basement of St. Paul & St. James Episcopal Church in Wooster Square. The performance was part of Creative Circle, a dance showcase that also featured in-progress work from SYREN Modern Dance.
“I wanted everyone to do everything, and I didn’t want anything to be stationary,” Robbins said. “We worked really hard to make sure everyone would be wireless, and that everyone can dance.”
Robbins first began choreographing dances for the project in 2022, but the origins of the music trace back to 1999, when Providence-based Mercy Velvet released Live in Vain, their debut record. Soon after recording it, however, the band's guitarist and vocalist got divorced, leading to their breakup. Their music was shelved and never made it to streaming. Save for a few CDs and some local performances at the time, nobody heard them play.
“I was like ‘Oh shit, that’s the end of the band,’” recalls Mark Robbins. “‘We just did this really cool thing and now we’re gonna stop. That’s really unfortunate.’” But little did Robbins know that, 25 years down the line, his daughter Alexis would pull Live in Vain off the shelf, dust it off, and breathe new life into the album.
She explained that the goal of the show, beyond reviving her father’s music, is to show that “music and dance are the same thing.” The Mercy Velvet Project eschews the typical concert composition in which dancers serve as back-up to instrumentalists, simply adding flourishes to the main performance. Instead, the group’s members weave in between each other, twisting bodies narrowly missing swinging guitar and bass necks. Kim’s and Echols’s playing is just as acrobatic as the dancers, soloing while holding their instruments behind their heads or while laying on the ground.
“I’m trying to teach people that tap dance is music, tap dancers are musicians,” Robbins said. “We are the drums in this show. I’m a percussionist via my feet.” To create the choreography, Robbins had to not only find movements which fit the mood of the songs, but also which accurately reproduced her father’s rhythms. The result is a compact drum kit suffused across an expansive wooden floor. High-hats and snares are transposed to toe hits—and basses and toms, heels.
“It was really moving,” Mark Robbins said. “I’m blown away by it. It’s something that means a lot to me that’s being reinterpreted by her in really creative ways.”
This performance was kamrDANCE’s second time previewing a draft of the show to the public. In October 2022, they performed “Addiction” at the Hill Museum of Art. On Saturday, they added a second track, “Good Morning Babylon,” giving viewers a sample of what will eventually become an hour-long production which Robbins said she is aiming to finish in 2025. The next preview of the show will be performed on November 15 at Arts On Site in New York’s Lower East Side.
The weekend’s showcase also featured work from SYREN Modern Dance, a New York-based dance company whose work explores the fusion of art and science. In the past they used dance to explore quantum mechanics and relativity, and their current project brings the question of artificial intelligence to the stage.
Choreographer Kate Sutter chose four “pillars” of AI to represent through movement: artificial intelligence, consciousness, machine learning, and neural networks. As she announced these prompts, the three dancers—Jessica Nolan, Lynn Peterson, and Roxanne Potes—each responded with their own interpretations. Then, almost algorithmically, they combined their discrete, individual motions into a singular dance.
SYREN Modern Dance.
“AI is very in the vernacular right now, so this was my way of bringing to dialogue all these questions,” Sutter said. “I was scared to ask the questions, because you feel like you don’t know enough, but I think we should all be asking questions. These are amazing technologies but also scary ones.” She explained that, as she developed the piece with her dancers, they read about and discussed AI in order to be able to translate its mechanics into dance.
To end the day, SYREN and kamrDANCE members invited the audience to participate in an improv dance. One young spectator, Alicja Bartnicka, jumped up from her seat, took center stage, and tossed her stuffed bear back to her father. She moved back and forth as effortlessly as the professionals, gracefully stretching her arms and chaotically swinging her legs.
An improv dance with audience participation ends the performance.
“I follow the music and the music follows me,” she announced with a smile.