Dance Dance Evolution.

Heloise & the Savoir Faire build a killer disco machine

GLAM SLAM Heloise, front and center, & the Savoir Faire are elegant, decadent and powerful.

Seeing Heloise & the Savoir Faire for the first time presents a problem: Do you dance to the group's dynamic disco or watch as Heloise Williams and her two costumed dancers cavort through their debauched routines? "There seems to be an adjustment period for people who come see us," says Sara Sweet Rabidoux, one of the dancers and the Brooklyn group's choreographer. "At first they need to take it all in; when they come back, then they're ready to dance." Adds Williams with some satisfaction: "There's a lot going on up there, yeah."

She's not bragging: Powerhouse vocalist Heloise (say it like you're French: "EH-loo-eez") and her group present a complete postmodern disco spectacle. While this week's release of their first album, Trash, Rats & Microphones, on actor Elijah Wood's Simian Records, is a big deal for the sextet (another famous fan, Deborah Harry, contributes vocals to two songs), live performance remains their focal point; in look as well as in sound, the group draws freely from the past and present, with streaks of classic disco, new wave and rock coming together around Williams's anthemic vocals in a tightly orchestrated mess of decadently glammy misfit cool.

Fresh off a brief trip to London, where they played a few club shows and appeared before millions of viewers on Channel 4's The Friday Night Project, Williams and Rabidoux are seated around a wineglass-littered table in Williamsburg's Roebling Tea Room with drummer Luke Hughett. At times adopting a comically faux-posh voice, like a slumming socialite, Williams explains her mid-2001 arrival in NYC from Vermont, where she went to college. "The building where I lived in Burlington had just been condemned," she says. "That same day I got two answering-machine messages, from an old neighbor and my father. Both said, 'You should move to New York'- which I had always wanted to do." Waving her hand, she adds, "It was like the cosmos went, zing-zing!"

In Vermont, where she studied art and music, Williams sang jazz vocals with the group Viperhouse and even appeared on Phish's 1998 album The Story of the Ghost --"unlikely," she admits, "but it happened." Trey Anastasio wouldn't be the last celebrity drawn into Williams's orbit. In 2003, another old friend, fashion designer Rachel Comey, introduced her to Peaches, who needed an extra hand on tour. "Seeing [Peaches and Mignon, her cohort] rocking out in front of big crowds really kicked my ass," Williams recalls. "They did it with just themselves and a backing track." It wasn't long before she recruited dancer Joe Shepard, yet another pal from Vermont, and Rabidoux (who ran her own dance company, Hoi Polloi, for ten years) and formed Heloise & the Savoir Faire Dancers, with just the three performing to the accompaniment of Williams's laptop. "Sara and Joe lived in Boston at the time. They took the Fung Wah bus down to do every show with me for two years," Williams says.

Given that level of dedication, it was soon time to get more serious with their fun. "Not to say what we'd been doing was vacuous," Williams says, "but I missed the improvising aspect of having people in the band. I wanted drums and bass with a cranky guitar and luuush synths; I wanted more meat behind it." At that, a grinning Hughett chimes in: "Thank you!"

It isn't just the musical side of Heloise & the Savoir Faire that relies on improvisation. In need of a costume change during one of the London shows, Rabidoux procured silver trash bags on the fly, adding flashy literalism to the album title. "For all our rehearsal and planning, there's something we love about the in-the-momentness of performing in clubs," she says. "The sudden bin-liner costumes- that was just the desire to make each performance as absurd and wonderful for the crowd as we possibly can. If that means changing midset into garbage bags, we're going to do that. If it means doing a back walk-over in a loincloth into the audience, we're going to do that."

Such show-at-all-costs determination is part and parcel of disco's nature, as is the power of a sharp look and attitude to project coolness. In Turn the Beat Around, his social and cultural history of disco, Peter Shapiro describes the form as "the humble peon beamed up to the cosmic firmament by virtue of his threads and dance moves," which also applies to Heloise & the Savoir Faire. "There's a serious nerddom thing going on in the band," Williams says. "None of us feel like we're part of any cool scene where you're like, 'Do I fit in?' Fuck that - you fit in if you're just representing the way you are. That's our M.O.: being true to your heart…and also having fun with the artifice."