Dancers of Damelahamid’s Margaret Grenier wins national Walter Carsen Prize
The Gitxan and Cree artist also helms Vancouver’s annual Coastal Dance Festival
Photo by Ana Pedrero
Dancers of Damelahamid and Coastal Dance Festival head Margaret Grenier has just been awarded the 2020 Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts by the Canada Council for the Arts.
The $50,000 award recognizes the highest level of artistic excellence and distinguished career achievement by a Canadian professional artist in music, theatre, or dance.
Born in Prince Rupert and now based in Gibsons, Grenier is of Gitxsan and Cree heritage. She was trained from a very young age in traditional Gitxsan dance by her parents, Kenneth and Margaret Harris, and has been working as a professional dancer with Dancers of Damelahamid since 1991. Today, she leads the Indigenous dance company as executive and artistic director.
Dancers of Damelahamid emerged in the 1960s out of an urgency to save the knowledge of Gitxsan ancestors, the art and culture banned by the Canadian government for several decades.
She choreographed the full-length work Sharing the Spirit in 2007, a show that toured internationally to New Zealand in 2008 and to the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, China. Her critically lauded multimedia show Flicker debuted at the Cultch in 2016; coproduced by the Canada Dance Festival, it was presented at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre.
Grenier is also the producer and director of the annual Coastal Dance Festival, established in 2008 and centred out of the UBC Museum of Anthropology. It celebrates and showcases not only Indigenous dance from across this country, but international artists from South America, Norway, New Zealand, and Australia. Grenier also holds a Masters of Arts in Arts Education from SFU.
“I have witnessed and experienced an immense shift in the world of dance as a result of our collective struggle to create space for our Indigenous dance practices and overcome colonial barriers. It is my hope that every achievement opens new possibilities and breathes strength into one another and our arts,” Grenier said in the announcement today.
Presented for the first time in 2001, the Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts was created out of a $1.1 million donation to the Canada Council by Toronto businessman and philanthropist Walter Carsen. The prize is awarded annually on a four-year cycle, alternating dance, theatre, dance, music. Grenier is the 19th winner of the prize, with previous winners including ballet icon Veronica Tennant and Vancouver composer Rodney Sharman.
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