Silvana Cardell

Cardell Dance Theater

Creating Imaginative Dance Performances for Social Change

Cardell Dance Theater is an ensemble that gathers artists to create imaginative and thought-provoking dance performances. Led by Silvana Cardell, the company creates projects addressing social justice issues, as she passionately believes that artistic expression and imagination can promote essential global change. 

With each project, the company creates performances exploring topics and challenging systems of oppression through its unique brand of creativity and artistry.

The arts have the potential to bring people together to create a more just and equitable society. I explore social justice issues beyond human-centric perspectives, including animal rights and environmental justice. I critically examine the value of bodies, borders, and territories by challenging hierarchical orders.

Press

It was Supper that prompted thoughts of borders. . . . Inside are long folding tables, which soon become the site of a Last Supper, arranged like Leonardo da Vinci’s, the kind of farewell dinner that precedes leaving one’s homeland. The tables are key. On four legs or tilted, they serve as platforms for the dancers, who scramble up their sides or run along their edges. The tables represent walls, as at borders, and the dancers slip through the gaps between them, gaps that sometimes slam shut. . . . Directed and choreographed by Silvana Cardell, who herself emigrated to Philadelphia from Buenos Aires more than a decade ago, “Supper” is a collection of imagistic sketches. It’s most effective when it’s moving fast, conveying the terror and difficulty of many emigrant experiences.
BRIAN SEIBERT
The New York Times
In her most recent dance theater work, Supper, People on the Move, Argentine American choreographer Silvana Cardell showcases how dance can confront social issues viscerally, triggering responses that tap something as deep as migration is to our very existence. . . . Together, the physical, unrelenting encounter between dancers and audience, effects an empathy and a recognition that statistics reporting, and images so rarely achieve. . . . The room—like the stories—could be anywhere lengthening their journeys, the room recedes behind powerful imagery.
CAROLYN MERRITT
ThINKingDANCE