About Us

Andrea Ariel Dance Theatre creates original, multi-disciplinary dance-based performances centered at the heart of our human experiences. Inspired by the poetic and everyday elements of life, the company engages in a collaborative, ensemble-based process to explore personal, social, political, and environmental issues with inquisitiveness and imagination. We cultivate creative opportunities for diverse audiences and participants through performances, community projects, classes, workshops, and educational and training residencies.

Over the last twenty-five years, Andrea Ariel Dance Theatre has presented bold and energetic performances that celebrate the spirit of human nature and grow from asking timely questions about our experiences in contemporary society. Andrea Ariel, Artistic Director, founded the company in 1990 to develop and promote her artistic projects and to cultivate an inter-relationship between artistic creation and the community. Based in Austin, Texas, AADT has presented over 50 new works, hosted countless community and educational programs with youth and adults, and has provided opportunities for the development and presentation of hundreds of artists from diverse disciplines.

Praised as exhilarating, sophisticated, and beautiful to watch, Andrea Ariel Dance Theatre exhibits a distinct movement style that brings together the raw and refined techniques of contemporary dance and devised physical theater. Driven by a passion to confound form between disciplines, the company engages in collaborative projects of the highest caliber involving composers, musicians, singers, actors, writers, visual and media artists.

Our work has included original scores by Graham Reynolds and Peter Stopschinski, the world-class voice of opera singer Cheryl Parrish, singer/songwriter Patricia Pike, The Golden Hornet Project as a six-piece orchestra with operatic voices, and NYC composer/conductor Walter Thompson with an 18-member orchestra of dancers, singers, actors and musicians. The company’s most recent innovation, The Bowie Project: A Rock & Roll Soundpainting is a collaboration with Austin’s Bowie tribute band Super Creeps and NYC’s Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble in a hybrid performance of dance and theater in a rock and roll concert. As a certified Soundpainting conductor and educator, Andrea Ariel is currently developing an Austin Soundpainting ensemble. See more here

Since the company’s inception, AADT has gained renown for large-scale, thematic works brought to life in specially tailored, on-site locations including an abandoned warehouse, a former car-dealership showroom, city parks, and inside homes (empty and occupied). We have danced on twenty-foot ropes with fifty-gallon steel drums suspended from them, in dresses fashioned out of plastic amid a set of plastic trash, and beneath an overhead metal sculpture. We have achieved new heights with video design including the use of seven state of the art projectors sponsored by High End Systems and Barco.

In 2014, the company received seven nominations and three awards from the Austin Critics Table for The Bowie Project and Heart. Four times voted “Best Choreographer/Dancer” by the Austin Chronicle Reader’s Poll, Andrea Ariel and the company’s dancers and collaborators have been previously honored with two awards and seven nominations by the Austin Critics Table and the B. Iden Payne Awards.

ARTSPLUS, arts-in-education programs, have been held for sixteen years at Austin elementary schools including Metz, Robert E. Lee, Brooke, and Decker, and most recently at Rawson Saunders culminating in public performances.  Our Interactive Arts Community Projects in Austin have included collaborations with the University YWCA; The Self-Portrait Project, for at-risk youth at Fairway Village Apts. and Oak Creek Village Apts., and for women in recovery at the Austin Family House, Legacy Program. Other programs have included Rosedale Community School, with multiply-disabled youth; Lake Travis, McCallum and Plugerville High Schools, Austin Theater for Youth, and St. Andrews Episcopal School.

In 2011, Community Voices was formed to cultivate a unique contribution to Austin’s cultural arts and community by initiating innovative ways to interact with the community. The program invites community members to participate in free workshops that offer an opportunity for people to come together and be creative, share stories, dialogue, explore, learn innovative ways to connect with others, and meet new people.