Patrick Suzeau
Master Fellowship in Choreography

Suzeau’s career includes Les Ballets Modernes du Canada, and Theatre de Danse Contemporaine while in Montreal, various groups and television work while in Mexico City. He danced for Mary Anthony, Pearl Lang, Anna Sokolow and several independent choreographers while in New York City and toured solos for New York’s national Affiliate Artists program.  More recently he was a soloist in masterworks for Limon, Humphrey and La Meri. 

He co-founded with Muriel Cohan the COHAN/SUZEAU Dance Company that has performed nationally and abroad to critical acclaim.  Recipient of several grants and fellowships from private and public funds COHAN/SUZEAU is on the roster of the N.E.A. Regional Touring Program and the Kansas Arts Commission Touring Program. 

Recent international appearances include India, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia.  On a Fulbright Fellowship (2007), Suzeau was sponsored by the American Embassy and the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater to mount his work on academy students and soloists of the National Opera Ballet.  In March/April 2008 he taught and mounted his work on the National Academy for Film and Theater in Sofia, Bulgaria.  October 2008 he performed for Beijing’s Tsinghua University in the Temple of the Earth at an international conference on ecocriticism. A certified movement analyst from the Laban Institute for Movement Studies, NYC, Juilliard trained Suzeau received his MA from Wesleyan University, CT and a BA from Empire State College, NYC.

Professor Suzeau has been acclaimed for his “prodigious technique” by Dance Magazine and as a “supple, physically expressive, strong dancer” by The New York Times.

Artist Statement

Recipient of a Phoenix award for his contribution to the artistic life of Lawrence, Suzeau guests twice yearly with the Unviersity of Kansas Dance Company. He regularly participates in local benefit concerts and at the Lawrence Arts Center's annual Regional Choreography Festival. He also performs in Kansas City. Suzeau appears at Washington University as a solo artist once or twice a year. Other recent Midwest concerts include: Oklahoma Arts Institute, University of Madison, Iowa State University, University of Oklahoma, High Plains Arts Council, Nebraska.

In the past five years alone he has choreographed eleven works. He has also been active as an adjudicator for the Kansas City's Japan Festival (2002-08), Topeka Performing Arts Center (2002-04, 09), and for the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Project (2008).

In Suzeau's choreography dancers are never treated soley as abstract dynamic shapes moving through space. Instead they are people sharing a space, creating a community onstage. Occasionally including text he feels that movement, with its own kinetic syntax reveals what words alone cannot. When combined, movement and text are used to produce a layering of experience. Suzeau is interested in our essential links as human beings as well as the symbols that reveal them. He aims at poetic distallations.

In addition to ballet and contemporary dance he is a trained East Indian Bharatanatyam classical dancer, a form that includes dazzling rhythmic patterns with intricate symbolic hand gestures. Suzeau continues to explore a synthesis of South Asian and western dance forms.