NIKKI FEIRT ATKINS

Founder and Producing Artistic Director American Dance Machine for the 21st Century; Co-Executive Producer, Chita Rivera Awards

Nikki Feirt Atkins is a former dancer and an M.D.  Nikki studied ballet as a scholarship student at New Jersey Ballet and at the Joffrey Ballet School in New York. In addition, she studied Graham, Horton, East Indian dance (Bharatanatyam),  jazz with Matt Mattox, Luigi and Betsy Haug with whom she performed. Of note, Nikki studied with Lee Theodore, founder of the original American Dance Machine, who had a profound influence on Nikki.  After a brief career as a professional dancer, Nikki went on to obtain her B.A. Magna Cum Laude in biology and performing arts at New York University. She subsequently earned her M.D., completed her residency and fellowships at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Cornell and Columbia and become a practicing pathologist and researcher at Columbia University Medical Center. While working as a part-time pathologist in private practice, Nikki became involved in several dance projects, including  working with Chet Walker on projects including the early stages of The Jack Cole Project. In February 2012, Nikki founded American Dance Machine for the 21st Century, where she is currently Founder and Producing Artistic Director.

ABOUT American Dance Machine for the 21st Century: American Dance Machine for the 21st Century (ADM21) has a rich history of artistic excellence. The American Dance Machine was originally founded in 1976 by Lee Becker Theodore, a noted Broadway dancer, choreographer, and director, to address her belief that many great choreographic works are lost with the production of the musical they once embellished. The company reconstructed and staged American musical theater choreography from 1976 until Lee Theodore’s death in the late 1980s.

In February 2012, Nikki Feirt Atkins founded American Dance Machine for the 21st Century (ADM21). The mission of this 501c3 non-profit organization is to preserve great works of musical theater choreography by creating a “Living Archive” in order to ensure that significant musical theater choreography, and the techniques that propel such works, would be preserved, studied and shared in the 21st century. Prior to the late 1960s, Broadway musicals were not filmed. The books and scores of shows were preserved for posterity, but the dances within these shows ran the risk of being lost. The need to properly hand them down by either the living choreographer or the dancers on whom the choreography was set was crucial so that the original nuance and intent would not be lost over time.

Since their inception, ADM21 has reconstructed and filmed the reconstruction of numerous choreographic works by choreographers such as Jack Cole, Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Agnes de Mille, Gower Champion, Gene Kelly, Michael Bennett, among others, and has presented them at studio showings, within programs such as Dancers Responding to AIDS, Dance Against Cancer, Career Transition for Dancers, The Fred & Adele Astaire Awards, and two successful seasons at The Joyce Theater (2014, 2015–2016). Our two Joyce performances were filmed and are archived  at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Library – Jerome Robbins Dance Division, along with our “process” videos detailing legendary dance luminaries including Chita Rivera, Donna McKechnie, Marge Champion, Gemze de Lappe and more, coaching today’s dancers in roles that they created.
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ADM21’s mission also includes establishing an educational program to inspire and enrich musical theater dance students and choreographers in the development of a distinctive artistic expression, through an expanded course of dance instruction, which unites the work of musical theater’s founding choreographers and teachers, with current styles and trends.

For more information, please visit www.adm21.org.

 

Nikki Feirt Atkins, Chita Rivera, Joe Lanteri at the Chita Rivera Awards ©Patrick McMullan