Gabrielle Roth (February 4, 1941 – October 22, 2012) was an American dancer and musician in the world music and trance dance genres, with a special interest in shamanism.

She founded an experimental theatre company in New York, wrote three books, created over twenty albums of trance dance music with her band The Mirrors, and directed or has been the subject of several videos.

Born in San Francisco on February 4, 1941,[2][3] Gabrielle Roth described being inspired by the dance of Spanish gypsy La Chunga and by seeing the Nigerian National Ballet.

[3][5] Roth was a faculty member at The Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and taught at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck, New York.

Roth directed theatre productions of Savage/Love, by Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin, at The Culture Project in Mercer Street, New York City.

[4] Roth wrote three books: Sweat Your Prayers: Movement as Spiritual Practice, Maps to Ecstasy: Teachings of an Urban Shaman, and Connections: The 5 Threads of Intuitive Wisdom.

Sweat Your Prayers begins with an autobiographical prologue, "God, Sex, & My Body", in which she writes of the contradictions in her personality that led her to dance.

[8] She notes that she was taught by Catholic nuns "with eyes trained to scan for sin"[9] and that her first dance teacher was "an old woman with frizzy dyed red hair, a funny accent, and a long thin stick" who would beat her whenever she made a mistake, initiating in Roth a severe inferiority complex.

[14] Hot Indie News described Still Chillin as "without question yoga music" that "lends to an ambient, trance-like, meditative state".

[18] The 5Rhythms movement system, founded by Roth in the late 1970s, focuses on five body rhythms: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness and is according to Jed Lipinski in The New York Times "a way to become conscious through dance".

[23] Christine Ottery, in The Guardian, states that "ecstatic dancing has an image problem" and "encompasses everything from large global movements such as 5 Rhythms and Biodanza to local drum'n'dance meet-ups".