Susanna Sloat is a writer and editor in New York City who has written about many kinds of dance, recently mostly for Ballet Review. She is the editor of “Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures” (2010) and “Caribbean Dance from Abakuá to Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity” (2002), both available from University Press of Florida.
Under are the articles written for DanceTabs.
David Gordon’s work (1972/2020) at the Philadelphia FringeArts Festival
David Gordon has been collaging past choreography and present variations, text and narration, video and photographs and graphic arts, personal and cultural history for so long that it is no surprise he was perfectly positioned to make something truly involving under lock down…
Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance – 20th Anniversary Virtual Season
★★★★✰ Ice Cycle is an unusually beautiful vision suggesting, at times, the effects of global warming, encompassing Sperling’s environmental concerns as well as her choreographic and design mastery.
Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble – premiere of the online version of Anna Sokolow’s Rooms
★★★★✰ Rooms2020 retains Sokolow’s intensely expressive choreography, which makes it a striking documentation of the aloneness and alienation that can pervade this time of pandemic.
Dormeshia – And Still You Must Swing – streamed recording
★★★★★ Dormeshia’s And Still You Must Swing is the first online dance that made me want to write about it. I knew it would be good…
Carnaval in Guadeloupe
To say Carnival can be an all-consuming celebration of life seems something of an understatement for some communities and nations. Susanna Sloat with a lively and detailed account of a recent Eastern Caribbean jaunt to Guadeloupe. And the spelling? Well, it’s always Carnaval in Guadeloupe…
Nona Hendryx and Disciples of Sun Ra in the Temple – New York
★★★✰✰ “Space is the Place,” was the Sun Ra anthem. And those were the words for the last song in a tribute to the late pianist and Arkestra leader, conceived by Nona Hendryx and presented by Met Live Arts and Harlem Stage, at the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum…
Gilles Brinas’ Che Malambo – New York
★★★✰✰ Lasting 75 minutes the Che Malambo show is quite spectacular, if unevenly so…
New York City Ballet – Stravinsky & Balanchine bill – New York
★★★★✰ New York City Ballet is off to a fine start when it opens the winter season with a very well-danced all Balanchine, all Stravinsky program.
Gregory Maqoma – Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Boléro – New York, Joyce Theater
★★★★✰ The dance style is a fusion of many elements of South African dance, other African and African diaspora influences, and modern and postmodern dance. It can be both liquid and percussive and has a complexity that is hard to take apart.
Gabrielle Revlock – SEX TAPE, Nuptial Blitz – New York
★★★✰✰ Revlock “is a dance-maker whose work often depicts complicated but relatable interpersonal relationships using a vocabulary that embraces the pedestrian, abstracted by degrees.”
DELIRIOUS Dances / Edisa Weeks – 3 RITES: Liberty – New York
★★★★✰ DELIRIOUS Dances / Edisa Weeks’ “3 RITES: Liberty” is a solo that graphically shows why the Declaration of Independence did not, & does not, mean “liberty” for many African Americans…
Faye Driscoll – Thank You For Coming: Space – New York
★★★✰✰ A sense of very controlled chaos accumulates. I’m sometimes reminded of the videos and installations of the artist Bruce Nauman. Her actions and interactions, including snatches of willfully, wonderfully contorted dancing…
