Press
October 2, 2011
- Washington Post, “Jane Comfort troupe opens American Dance Institute season with fantastic performance”
By Rebecca Ritzel
Which is why the folks at American Dance Institute look like geniuses for opening the inaugural season of their renovated theater in Rockville with Jane Comfort’s six-member company. Saturday’s show sold out; Sunday’s came close. And the actual performance? Fantastic and fascinating.
September 30, 2011
- Washington Post: Going Out Guide, “Jane Comfort & Company: Dancer Barbie! She’s no ideal in Jane Comfort work”
By Lisa Traiger
Comfort’s company performs “Beauty” and another work, “Underground River,” this weekend at Rockville’s American Dance Institute. In “Beauty,” Comfort skewers our obsession with the Western definition of female beauty. The dancers wear wigs, shiny skin-tone spandex tights and push-up bras to attain the Barbie look. Their stiff-legged, tiptoed walks and elbows bent just so complete the picture.
September 29, 2011
- Washington City Paper, “The Rockville Suite: How American Dance Institute Became the Area’s Most Progressive Dance Venue”
By Amanda Abrams
It’s also home this year to the Washington area’s best high-profile experimental modern dance performances, offering some bright spots in what’s otherwise a pretty lackluster season. Take the wider view, of course, and ADI isn’t a game-changer for D.C.’s modern dance audiences. But its approach—subsidizing the art with lucrative children’s classes, knowing the limitations of the form’s appeal, and finding enterprising ways to bring an audience into its small house—deserves attention from the area’s dance venues.
September 2011
- ADI was featured in the Washington Post’s going out guide. Read More…
Thursday, May 19, 2011
- Washington Post, “Fraulein Maria’ at American Dance Institute”
By Lisa Traiger
What would Mother Superior say?
In choreographer Doug Elkins’s remix of “The Sound of Music,” the nuns wear hoodies and channel Martha Graham; 16-year-old Liesl is played by a six-foot man sporting pink satin; and there’s not one Maria, but three, including a broad-chested dude.
” ‘The Sound of Music’ is kind of my Proustian madeleine,” Elkins says by phone from his home in New York. “I was 4 or 5. . . . It probably was my first sense of some kind of musical theater. . . . Either kindergarten or nursery [school], we did “Do-Re-Mi” and I was given an oak-tag sun with the word ‘re’ on it. I was ‘re — a drop of golden sun.’ “
With that memory in mind, it comes as little surprise that the choreographer decided to deconstruct the film and reassemble it as a postmodern dance with witty references to Isadora Duncan, Graham, Paul Taylor, Mark Morris, hip-hop, voguing and more. The result? “Fraulein Maria,” a clever and charm-filled homage to the 1965 film classic that comes to Rockville’s American Dance Institute on Saturday
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
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The Gazette, “Amazing Grace: Ballet ADI’s new artistic director stages an evening of contemporary and classical ballet”
by Topher Forhecz | Staff Writer
In an expansive, brightly-lit rehearsal space at Rockville’s American Dance Institute (ADI), Runqiao Du gazes at the bodies moving across the polished wooden floor. His eyes dart from dancer to dancer as he matches their moves with the choreographed steps in his mind’s eye. The quick patter of the dancers’ feet and the snaps of his fingers keeping time are the only sounds.
The newly appointed artistic director of ADI is preparing the dancers of Ballet ADI, the institute’s dance company, for “Unstoppable Grace,” the four-part show they will perform on Saturday and Sunday. The cast includes ADI students, as well as professionals from the Washington Ballet.
Read the full story