American Dance Festival

The American Dance Festival (ADF) is a six and four-week school for dance and a six-week summer festival of modern dance performances, currently held at Duke University and the Durham Performing Arts Center in Durham, North Carolina.

The precursor to today’s American Dance Festival began in 1934 as the Bennington Festival, a summer program at Bennington College where modern dance pioneers Hanya Holm, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman came together to teach dance technique and perform new works. For one year, in 1939, Bennington moved the program to Mills College in Oakland, California, but it was back in Vermont by 1940. It ceased to exist after the summer of 1942.