Myth, music and memory collide when The ReMemberers take the stage. A performance trio that blends ancient stories and live performance, their events often feel more ritual than entertainment. 

Based in Massachusetts, the group features three multi-talented performers: Alex Harvey — who plays instruments like the saz, shakuhachi and mandriola — percussionist and storyteller John de Kadt and vocalist Violet Southard. 

Together, the trio reimagines classic tales of myth and legend as layered performances that interweave narrative, music and a deep sense of connection. Highlighting the meditative quality of their work, the group often refers to their performances as “prayer-formances.” 

“There’s lots of music, of course, and we sometimes say something like ‘Not quite a concert, not quite a theater piece, but dreaming of the in-between,'” Harvey said. “Today in rehearsal, we noticed about half of the whole evening is music and half of the evening is story, but they are so woven together, you might not notice.”

Currently on tour with their interpretation of the Nordic folktale “The Lindworm,” The ReMemberers present the story as one of courage, transformation and personal reflection. 

“In this particular tale…there is a queen who gives birth to twins, and one of the twins is a snake and one of the twins is a normal child,” Harvey said. “The midwife throws the snake away and tries to hide the snake away. The reason why that happened is because the queen was trying to fix a problem of being infertile, and somebody helped her cast a spell, and she did the spell wrong, and she tried to ignore the fact that she did the spell wrong.”

“The snake turns into a major problem, a catastrophic problem for the kingdom, because it was something that was hidden, forgotten about, ignored, turned away from,” he added.

The group is making several stops across Colorado, performing at venues ranging from Denver’s Swallow Hill and the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs to intimate spaces like Carbondale’s True Nature Healing Arts. 

“I grew up in Colorado and spent a ton of time in Eagle County, Summit County, and a fair amount of time in Glenwood as well…I have a big emotional, spiritual and familial connection to the state,” Harvey said. “Often, I have an instinct to come back home and share whatever I’m doing out in the world with Coloradans.”

Through their performances, The ReMemberers hope to help audiences reconnect with parts of themselves they may have lost. 

“We call this The ReMemberers because remembering the story is the same thing as putting together these kind of disparate, broken parts of ourselves that haven’t come together in a long time,” Harvey said. “Telling these stories in all of these traditions, the whole point is to bring parts of ourselves together that haven’t touched each other in a long time.

“Whenever I take this story to a small town…a great ratio of the audience comes up afterwards and says, ‘I feel in touch with something that I never knew was a part of me,'” he added. “That’s the idea of what remembering yourself is.”

He likens the experience to watching a film — without the screen. 

During some of their earlier performances, “Everyone was like, ‘This is crazy —it’s like I’m watching a movie with no technology. I’m listening to and I’m experiencing this music and these sounds, and it’s all projecting on the back of my head like I’m watching this beautiful film,'” Harvey said. 

A longtime filmmaker, Harvey took the feedback as a creative challenge — could he continue to create cinematic experiences for his audience?

“That (response) was great for me because I had been a filmmaker for so many years and a lot of times one of the things that I would say about movies is I love to hear a great film,” Harvey said. “I’m very, very interested in the sound track of films, not just the music , but I’m interested in the sound design and the texture that is created sonically in a film.”

Though The ReMemberers began performing “The Lindworm” in 2024, the group feels that the tale of reckoning, transformation and courage resonates deeply in the current moment — one Harvey calls a period of “great instability and cultural dissent.” 

“I like this story because it’s about what we’re not looking at, and I think during periods of upheaval and panic, people don’t want to consider what they themselves aren’t considering,” Harvey said. “…It’s also a beautiful tale about transcendence and about the possibility of transformation: not all myths that we share have that feeling of regrowth, rebirth, renewal, but this one really does, and it comes in the face of really looking at what you don’t want to look at about yourself. 

“It felt like everybody on every side of every fight right now can take a dose of that,” he added.