Susanna "Suzi" SLOAT,

Susanna Sloat

Suzi's 2011 Autobiography

I spent my 67^th birthday on January 22, 2011 wandering happily with my husband, Don Burmeister, through Islamic Cairo. I had no idea that three nights later, from our hotel room overlooking Tahrir Square, I would see tear gas spreading in waves over protesters at the beginning of a revolution that they and we all hope will end in establishing democracy in Egypt.

Having grown up mostly in Parkway Village in Queens, built for the UN Secretariat, I felt torn away from it on the day 6^th grade ended at PS 117 Q, when we moved to Garden Lane, Westport and never felt like a Westporter, though my parents lived on High Point Road until they died in December 2006 and January 2007 and a brother still lives in town. Eager to get back to New York, I went to Barnard College and have lived in Morningside Heights ever on, since sophomore year on the same block, since senior year in the same apartment. The junkies are long gone (thanks Columbia) and even the crazy lady with pots on her head disappeared years ago. How has my neighborhood gotten so sane?

Down the block is Riverside Park, glorious with new green these days, and two other Olmstead parks, Morningside and Central, are nearby. I head to them for daily walks, 4 to 5 miles, and sometimes 6, 7, 8. When I get to other places, whether Cairo, Seattle, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and many more, I love to walk all day. Don and I walked across England along the Hadrian’s Wall Path last year. We’ve been together 40 years, married 37. Don’s been many things—a taxi driver, neurobiologist, manager of Safe-T-Mailer, owner of Safe-T-Gallery (a great, late art gallery in Brooklyn), and a photographer. See his pictures of Indian mounds in the January 2011 National Geographic. He also runs a web magazine, New York Photo Review—he’s the witty Reviewer No. 1 and I write for it occasionally. Our younger son, Tobias (b. 1978) works with Don at Safe-T-Mailer and still dreams of writing the great American science fiction novel. Our older son, Abe (b. 1975), started a business, Outlier, Inc. in Brooklyn, when he was bicycling to work (for a company for which he and four others have recently gotten a patent for a “display of market impact in algorithmic trading engine”) that now makes clothes out of the best possible fabrics (old like merino wool or the very latest) for people who combine biking and other outdoor activities with indoor ones.

Twenty years ago I began to write about dance, building on the African (particularly Congolese) and Afro-Caribbean dance classes I’d been taking, decades of listening to music and watching dance, and years as a writer and editor. This has become the major focus of my career. I’ve edited two books on Caribbean dance and culture, both published by University Press of Florida, the de la Torre Bueno prize-winning Caribbean Dance from Abakuá to Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity, in 2002, and Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures, in 2010. Working with so many fascinating, insightful dancer-choreographer-culture bearer-scholar authors has been richly illuminating. And--now taking Puerto Rican bomba and Dominican palos and gagá classes--I keep on dancing.

Suzi’s Update (2021)

In 2011, after a trip to Egypt that turned out to be in the middle of a revolution, I had hopes for more democracy there. Sadly, there is now much less. Sisi is a disaster.

For about seven years I wrote for Ballet Review until this more than half century old print publication published its last, very thick issue last year. Since January 2020 I’ve been writing for DanceTabs, which is online, writing mostly reviews, but also a long account of our trip last February to the island of Guadeloupe at Carnaval time.

No more exciting travel now, but I still take a four or more mile walk every day, still concentrating on local parks. And I’m still dancing. On my birthday, jazz came back to Riverside Park (it was wonderful from August to the beginning of

November last year, when I was also able to meet my Congolese dance family for classes in Marcus Garvey Park) and I dance to that.

Looking forward to getting my Covid-19 vaccination on the appointed day long before our Zoom get together. My husband Don’s was canceled due to lack of vaccine, so I hope he gets another appointment before then, too, and that all of us septuagenarians do.