The tap dance and live music collaborative Music From The Sole returns to Boston this week, bringing its latest theatrical production, the 70-minute “House is Open, Going Dark.” Founded in 2015 by Brazilian choreographer Leonardo Sandoval and composer/instrumentalist Gregory Richardson, the company is known for blurring the distinctions between movement and music. Nine performers will take the stage, including musicians who move and tappers who create a wide-ranging musical score with their feet, influenced by styles ranging from samba and Afro-Cuban to jazz and house. The Globe recently spoke with Richardson about the new work and the troupe’s commitment to fusing music and movement while highlighting both.
Q: Congratulations on your 10-year anniversary. That’s an accomplishment, yes?
A: In this climate of clamping down on the arts and funding, there’s a lot of uncertainty. But at this point we’re a close-knit family, and we have people we’re responsible for, to keep employed, provide an artistic outlet for. We have no choice but to push forward at full steam.
Q: A lot of this new show plays off that sense of family and friendship that you nurture in the group, doesn’t it?
A: Some of us have been friends since eight or nine years old. We are also dealing with the immigrant experience, with people from Brazil, Cuba, Honduras who can’t go home right now. It isn’t safe to leave the country. We really are each other’s family in real ways.
Q: Unlike the party atmosphere when you made your Boston debut last year with “I Didn’t Come to Stay,” the new “House is Open, Going Dark” is deeper, more theatrical. Can you elaborate?
A: We wanted to explore a few things. In most dance shows, the floor is just a big square, with the band upstage, or behind, or in the pit. But we don’t make a distinction between musicians and dancers, and didn’t feel that reflected what we wanted to do. We broke our tap floor up into five smaller segments, spread it across the stage on different levels like rooms of a house, and the [performers] are spread across the stage. Everything visually and spatially is mixed together. It represents the concept of integration. Also, the rooms help us tell a story, a kind of narrative about the domestic spaces we share and everyday interactions — we spend a lot of time together! There’s a sense of a journey that comes across, conflict and resolution.
Q: Can you describe some of the scenes?
A: Well, one of the things that often happens is we are waiting to leave and one person is still in the bathroom. So [in the scene], we are impatient, but Leo is in the shower doing body percussion and the mic looks like a shower head. Then he comes out and does part of a dance wearing a towel. That’s one of my favorite parts. Another starts with us all sitting around the kitchen table singing, which is something we often do.
Q: What was the process of creating this like, the collaborative give-and-take in generating material?
A: We have been really fortunate to have some amazing collaborators and supporters who have given us a lot of time and space with resources to workshop these ideas for the last couple of years and have showings. Every band member has contributed compositions, so it’s not top down…. We started a lot of this visually, with a couple big vision boards and kept outlining this story, then we’d take pieces and move them around until it came back around. Like Alice in Wonderland, falling down the rabbit hole, having this psychedelic journey, meeting friends, then ending up back where she started but having grown.
Q: What about the title? “House” seems to have two meanings here.
A: Exactly. There’s a visual representation of a house onstage, and “house is open” [refers to] 30 minutes before a show starts when you get an announcement that lets you know the window to go onstage is closed. “Going dark” is a warning you hear onstage if the house is going to black. We start the show literally inviting the audience up on stage when the house opens. We’ll be onstage so you can see us up-close warming up, look at the tap floors and microphone set-up. In a sense, our house is open and we’re inviting people in. “Going dark” suggests it’s not all fun and games and roses, and we wanted to represent that also, a counterbalance. We’ve dealt a little bit more with the real drama of being with the same people for weeks in a row, taking a chance to explore deeper emotional territory.
Q: What do you hope audiences take away from the work?
A: People don’t always quite understand that the dancers are making music with their feet, they are the percussion. Another thing is that I hear people say it looks like we’re having fun and really love each other, and I enjoy seeing people have that realization.
Music From The Sole: “House is Open, Going Dark”
Oct. 17-19, Celebrity Series of Boston at Boston Arts Academy Theater; celebrityseries.org
Karen Campbell can be reached at [email protected].
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