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REVOLVE Dance Project is a collaborative performing arts company based in Providence, Rhode Island. The summer company was born from a desire to explore cross disciplinary partnerships, specifically the intrinsic connection between music and dance. Comprising professional dancers, musicians, and choreographers from across the country, the group gathers for just several weeks to create a program of completely original world premiere works. At the end of this creation process, REVOLVE Dance Project holds a festival-like performance event for a live audience to share the work. This uniquely time-sensitive approach impels the artists to follow their creative instincts, yielding a final performance that is as exciting for them as it is for the audience. Just coming off of its inaugural season, the artists of REVOLVE Dance Project have created a distinctly familial feeling around their mission to highlight the collaborative nature of music and dance, bringing humanity back to these performing arts.

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REVOLVE Founder and Director Kirsten Evans has been a member of the professional company at Festival Ballet Providence for more than 10 years, performing a wide range of soloist and principal roles in both classical and contemporary works. Evans remarked, “As my dancing career progresses, I am finding myself more and more excited by the relationship between music, dance, and choreography. I am inspired to cultivate works by living artists and bring them to unique venues and spaces.” A lover of dance history, Evans noted a lack of choreography being made to the work of living composers. She felt compelled to see the historic partnerships between choreographers and composers like that of Petipa and Tchaikovsky or Balanchine and Stravinsky exist for today’s generation of artists. She launched REVOLVE Dance Project as a means of curating and nurturing these partnerships, subsequently continuing the art of dance and music as living collaborations.

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“That is REVOLVE, for me,” Evans continues, “The dance revolves around the music revolves around the dance. Dance makes you hear music differently. Live music makes you dance- automatically. When I see someone tapping their foot at a jazz club or bobbing their head to the busker in the park, I am reminded of the effects of live music on even those who do not call themselves dancers. Conversely, when I listen to music and close my eyes, I see movement and dancing, even though I am not a choreographer myself. The two are so inherently connected, when experienced live, they even make artists out of their audiences.” Each new work is created by integrating live musicians throughout the creation process, which provides a singularly dynamic palette for its of-the-moment choreographers and seasoned dancers in celebration of the innately intertwined nature of these art forms.