'Fraulein Maria' at American Dance Institute

By Lisa Traiger
Thursday, May 19, 2011

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.

The agency that controls the rights to Rodgers and Hammerstein's works at first objected to Elkins's plans for the beloved musical.

"So you want to dissect it?" a trustee asked him. "No," Elkins says he replied, "you only dissect a dead thing. 'Fraulein Maria' is like a strange little magic trick that you pull apart onstage. It's all up in the air, then when it lands, it's still there."

That's exactly what happens when Elkins, 50, and a dozen dancers take the stage. The familiar songs, the nuns, the clothes made out of drapes and, of course, Maria, all remain. What's not there? The boring parts, Elkins says slyly.

"Fraulein Maria," which premiered in 2006, has found a range of fans -- from hipster parents and their young children to drag-show divas and musical-theater buffs. But dance-history aficionados may get the biggest kick out of the multiple dance jokes and references. The self-described "style thief" borrows indiscriminately from any and all dance forms.

A closer look at the dancing nuns reveals a moment or two from Graham's "Night Journey." That trio of cavorting Marias? There's a touch of Duncan and Doris Humphrey. In "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" look for bits from Paul Taylor's "Aureole." One of Elkins's favorite moments remains "The Lonely Goatherd," which riffs on what he calls Afrocentric forms, from hip-hop to voguing to step dancing.

"You know that kids' magazine you used to read in the dentist office? 'Highlights' "? Elkins asks. "It's kind of like that hidden picture search."