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With "The Mercy Velvet Project," Dancers & Musicians Tap Into Connection

Lucy Gellman | January 20th, 2025

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Culture & Community  |  Dance  |  Dixwell  |  Music  |  NXTHVN  |  Arts & Culture

MercyTryp

MercyVelvetJan25 - 1Top: Robbins, Maria Clara Laet and Isabella Serricella. Bottom: Robbins and Echols. Lucy Gellman Photos.

Christie Echols swayed gently to a metronome of tap shoes and rapid-fire clapping, one hand fixed on the neck of their bass as the other let loose a round, resonant opening note. The clapping turned softer, retreating. I've traveled far / And I've traveled hard / Trying to find out / About love, they sang. Beneath their vocals, a percussion section came rolling in—but instead of drums and cymbals, it was dancers that carried it forward.   

Those steps—and the vibrant, heart-stirring cacophony of six tap shoes—came to NXTHVN last Friday afternoon, during a rehearsal for the Mercy Velvet Project. A rock opera from dancer, teaching artist and kamrDANCE founder and principal Alexis Robbins, the project builds on Mercy Velvet's 1999 album “Live In Vain” with new material, putting its own spin on the work. It is currently still very much a work in progress, with performances that have given audiences a look into how a work of art is put together.

Friday's rehearsal—part of an inaugural dance residency at NXTHVN with SYREN Modern Dance—featured music director Echols and tap dancers Maria Clara Laet and Isabella Serricella. Fellow collaborators on the project include vocalist Aster Rhys and dancers Megan Gessner and Alicyn Yaffee.

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"We're here [on earth] for a pretty limited time, so how do I make the most of that?" Robbins said of the questions that guide her on a recent episode of "Arts Respond" on WNHH-LP. "How does it get to feel meaningful? And meaning is different to everyone. But I think what is a through line is that we need to understand each other, and this concept of giving and receiving mercy, or empathy, is the only way that we can survive."

"Tap dance, it is dancing and it is really physically hard, but it is first and foremost music, and that's what makes it so special," she added. "We're using it as one of our modes of music-making and storytelling."

The Mercy Velvet Project, which has been cooking for almost exactly three years, starts in multiple places. The first is three decades ago, when Robbins' father, Mark Robbins, was the drummer in a band called Mercy Velvet. In 1999, the band released a single album "Live In Vain." It was a stunner of a work, Robbins recalled, with notes of feminist rock and propulsive drums and vocals that drove it forward. As a kid, she spent hours "jammin’ out to this album in our living room," and going so far as to choreograph a few numbers as she deepened her own interest in dance.

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But after it was released, the band's vocalist and guitarist split up, and the band dissolved. Mercy Velvet, which had only pressed a limited run of CDs, didn't get to spread its sonic footprint much farther than Providence, where Robbins' dad and other members were based. Unlike more popular albums from the time, the work never made it to streaming platforms. For years, the songs sat collecting dust, known only by a handful of people and loved deeply for their tight, fuzz-kissed lyricism and indie swerve. 

Then in January 2022, Robbins—within whom the music was still very much alive—decided to turn the album into a show. By then, she had been teaching for over a decade, and living and working in New Haven for six years. She began to think about what it meant to "quite literally transcribe the drums into tap dance," with an understanding of tap as both dance and a form of music.

When she dances, she explained, she's not thinking in terms of steps, but of rhythms like those a drummer might play—so the project made perfect sense to her. To that percussion, she has added layers and polyrhythms, with early performances in New Haven and New York to test out the concept. After meeting Echols at a jazz jam, she began to work with them to adapt the original music, making additions and edits to the original text in a way that felt expansive. Today, it still does.

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“The whole idea of what we're trying to say to audiences is, 'How do we give and receive mercy to each other?'" Echols said on the same episode of “Arts Respond.” "And I think that rings even clearer today. That's something that I ask myself a lot when we're in this creative process—how am I conveying this idea of giving mercy to my fellow colleagues or giving mercy to the audience? How do I convey this abstract idea?"

Three years in, that dream has bloomed into several of the album's tracks, with more on the way. In a series of public performances (read about those here, here, here, here and here) Robbins has grown the creative team to four other dancers and two musicians, including Echols and vocalist Aster Rhys. Each track, like each set of footfalls, has its own personality, pulling a member of the audience through something of a musical odyssey.

That's part of what makes the process exhilarating: no one stays in an artistic bubble. Dancers jump in on vocals and musicians dance, including with instruments that seem like they would make it impossible (Echols, for instance, gets on the floor with their bass, a feat they did not think themselves capable of until Robbins made it part of the performance.) They push each other but also cheer each other on, often in the span of a few verses.

"It's a huge undertaking to convince musicians how to be dancers. It's a huge undertaking to convince our dancers to sing and do these a cappella sections," Echols said. "It's been really rewarding to merge these two styles together ... we need to be doing more of this as artists, and working together to help each other."

“How Do You Feel?”

MercyVelvetJan25 - 8Friday, that commitment was on full display as mid-afternoon fell over Henry Street, the sky outside a clear blue and dotted with low-hanging, wispy white clouds. In a studio on NXTHVN's third floor, Echols went back to the beginning of "How Do You Feel?," the third track on "Live In Vain" and the second that the cast worked on during a week-long residency at the Dixwell arts incubator. It was the end of three days of dance, and somehow, artists still seemed primed for anything that came their way.

A long, low chord hummed over the room, and Robbins began to sway, one hand over her heart as her eyes closed and then fluttered open again. Her feet tapped with a metronome-like precision and Echols began to sing, the notes full and crystalline. Got to find a way / To fit into this place - Got to find a way / to connect with the human race, they sang.

No sooner had they finished a few bars than dancers came in, with a steady, clear pah-pah-pah ba-buh that felt like someone had slipped in behind a drum kit, and started to play.

The sound traveled across the studio, an energy crackling from the floor to the high ceiling. Spread out across the room, Laet and Serricella began to dance, their footfalls rolling out a rhythm beneath the bass. Laet slid her foot forward with a vigor that looked like she was gliding, and it whispered against the floorboards. Robbins had not yet begun to move, but she was already in it, her head swinging to the sound. Then she entered, letting the music take her. She was halfway across the room, hair flying, before Echols paused and revisited the score.

"Sorry," they said. "I counted eight in that middle section. It's 16, not eight." They readjusted, and took it from the top. Within minutes, six tap shoes had joined in, beating the floor, dancers airborne as they leaned in to the music, spun, rocked and shifted to conjure something that was their own and also not their own, a kind of music that exploded from every corner of the room. When they finished a section, the room fell into relieved sighs and surprising, momentary silence just as quickly.     

This is how the process goes, Robbins later explained to a small audience that had gathered for the rehearsal. The cast will work on a verse, and then another, and then another. While the nine-track "Live In Vain" is the source text, nothing is too precious or unchanging: a lyric might shift, or a rhythm might sound totally different than its 1999 inspiration, in service to the project. That's part of the magic.

A viewer could see that in real time as the afternoon wore on Friday, the sky outside streaked with ribbons of pink as dusk began its slow descent before 5 p.m. Framed in a large, clear sliding door at the end of the room, Robbins returned to the song, testing out new footwork in the group's final hour together.

"Can you—" she pointed to Laet and began to tap, her feet suddenly flying. Laet watched intently, as if she was studying a language that only the team members knew. She listened closely to the footfalls-turned-words, eyes glinting with a kind of certainty.

"—And then repeat this?" Robbins continued. She tapped out another phrase, letting her toe slide across the floor in a way that was just short of purring. For a moment, she stopped and smiled, scrunching her nose just a smidge. "My brain's tired," she sang out, and giggles drifted over the room. It was a reset: they were tapping in time with eighth notes moments later.

It's an intimate language of gestures, jumps, pounding feet and raw, rhythmic athleticism that the group has mastered. At one point, Robbins needed only to suggest "yeah, and then left foot?" and Echols seemed to know exactly what to do, returning to their bass. At another, Serricella tapped out a rhythm—"Is it supposed to feel like one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three to one-two-three-four?"—and Robbins tapped one back. Another still, and they began to joke through the music, Robbins doing a dreamy, pirouette-esque spin with a far-off look in her eyes.

"Let's skip ahead and let's do the longer four-four and let's—" Robbins exploded into movement as if to finish the sentence. The work, in part, personifies that tap is not just about one’s feet: her whole body is part of the music, arms often at their full wingspan, shoulders bobbing, chest puffed out or pulled in. Laet and Serricella moved forward, feet ringing the room into being as if the music was moving them forward. It was time to begin again.

That’s the thrill of the performance: it’s still an emergent thing, so young and fresh it is nearly dewy and mewling. For the artists involved, it has breathed new life into not just "Live In Vain," but also their own practices. In the coming year, Robbins and her collaborators plan to continue building the work, with a premiere that she would like to keep in New Haven or the greater New Haven region.   

"I feel like the arrangement really comes to life when all seven of us are working together to add its voice to it and add its story to it," Echols said. "To me, music is just kind of a bunch of notes thrown together until you have an artist retelling those notes to somebody to turn it into something that is musical."