Audiences were left in awe after the Asian Dance Troupe (ADT) Awards — the group’s spring semester showcase — took place on Saturday and Sunday in Goodrich Hall. ADT is the College’s only non-audition dance group and features a variety of Asian dances, such as K-pop, traditional Chinese, and South Asian styles. The show included 11 performances put on by a company of 42 dancers and led by performance director Lesley Iazzag ’26. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the group on hiatus, and it was revived in fall of 2021 but did not perform its first showcase until the spring of 2023. This performance marks the fourth showcase since.
ADT began preparing the spring showcase in January following the success of its fall semester show. “Unlike other dance groups on campus, we don’t recruit people based on audition or having callbacks,” president of ADT Abed Togas ’25 said in an interview with the Record. Instead, to recruit dancers for the show, ADT organized an interest meeting where prospective members could practice learning a dance.
Togas said choosing songs to perform for the showcase was a full-group effort. “We make our song selection process through a Google form to gauge everyone’s input,” he said.
The chosen songs were “Feel Special” by TWICE; “Nxde” by G(I)-DLE; “ParadoXXX Invasion” by ENHYPEN; “LOVE DIVE” by IVE; “Blue Flame” by Le SSerafim; and “Idol” by BTS. The set list also included solos for each graduating senior, a chorus medley that incorporated short clips of a variety of K-pop songs, a traditional Chinese dance, and a South Asian dance, which blended Kathak — a classical Indian dance form — with Bollywood styles.
Although the group primarily dances to K-pop songs, Togas emphasized the importance of embracing many styles of Asian dance. “We want to be a space where other Asian cultures can showcase their cultural dance,” he said.
“I learned traditional Chinese dance in middle school and high school, so I thought it would be fun to do it here and share what I’ve learned,” Charlene Peng ’26, who choreographed the Chinese Traditional Dance, wrote in an email to the Record. “None of the dancers had had much experience with traditional Chinese dance, but I taught them some basic fan and water sleeve technique, and they picked it up really quickly.”
“I feel like having [the Desi Dance] in an ADT space can open [it] up in many different ways where we were not bound by only having to do South Asia in a particular format,” Saumya Shinde ’26, who choreographed the Desi Dance, told the Record.
Dancer Kunal Pal ’25 explained the collaborative process of learning the K-pop dances. “We would watch some tutorials of how people do the dance,” he said. “[Then] we would just tell each other if there’s something we thought was off or tell each other what we could improve.”
Jenny Yu ’24, ADT’s secretary, discussed working with varied levels of prior dance experience as a part of a non-audition group. “With ‘LOVE DIVE,’ I think we had a slightly more advanced group with four out of the six people having previous dance experience,” she said. “And so I think with that group we were able to kind of go more fast paced and focus on small details that maybe other groups, depending on the people you’re given, may not be able to get to.”
This was the first semester in which ADT offered two shows rather than one. In addition, the group has significantly grown in size since its show in spring of 2023 — the last one was in 2018 — which influenced the award show theme of the showcase.
“We derived a lot of inspiration from Asian award shows that are really extravagant,” Togas said. “I think having ADT awards as our theme … pays tribute to the amount of work that everyone has put into this group and to kind of give us a pat on the back that, yeah, we kind of built this group from the ground up.”
“I think there was such a big change in people’s attitudes towards the club, because prior to our first performance [in years] people didn’t even know what ADT was,” Iazzag said of the group’s growth. “But after the show, everyone was so excited over everything.”
Togas highlighted the importance of not cutting interested students. “I think that Williams as an elite institution can be very suffocating and sort of hard to meet the expectations of perfection,” he said. “I think that removing the audition process really brings in people who have never even considered dance because of those scary desires for perfection that may have inhibited them prior.”
Dancer Terukimi Hayashi ’27 echoed Togas’ sentiment. “I’m glad that they introduced it as friendly for beginners,” he said. “It was nice having a dance group on campus that anybody could join.”
“I had never danced before in my life, and some combination of wanting to try something different, make new friends, and find a creative outlet pushed me to show up to the ADT interest meeting my freshman year and stick with it,” Sam Bishop ’25 added.
Pal, who used to dance Bhangra — a traditional Indian dance form — spoke highly of ADT. “Although we do want to perform well and will do the work to do so, the environment is so supportive and carefree,” he said. “The happiness, community, and release of stress that I would get from doing Bhangra — I get that from ADT.”
