Montreal choreographer Isabelle Van Grimde receives the 2011 Jacqueline Lemieux Prize
Montréal choreographer Isabelle Van Grimde (left) receives the 2011 Jacqueline Lemieux Prize. Shown here with Caroline Lussier, head of the Canada Council's Dance section.
Artist Profiles and Success Stories
On Wednesday October 26, Isabelle Van Grimde was awarded the 2011 Jacqueline Lemieux Prize at a ceremony at Agora de la danse, a Montréal-based dance company.
Isabelle Van Grimde is a dancer, choreographer, researcher and the artistic director of Van Grimde Corps Secrets. Based in Montreal, she has produced some 30 works which have intrigued and moved audiences across Canada and in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Germany, Poland and Slovakia. She has written several publications on dance, mentored many young dancers through Studio 303, a training, creation and presenting centre that she cofounded.
Throughout her successful career she has openly collaborated with a wide range of artists (visual arts, theatre, writing and music), as well as scientists and philosophers, to expand the boundaries of contemporary dance and help us to see dance and the body in new and exciting ways.
The Jacqueline Lemieux Prize, valued at $6000, will allow Van Grimde to examine how social, cultural and technological changes affect the way we look at the body. This will influence her choreography and potentially the larger dance milieu and artists beyond the field of dance.
Van Grimde’s work, funded by the Prize, will build on the research that has done over the past year – research that has had an impact on her choreography. For example Les chemins de traverse (“Crossroads”), 2005, brought together improvised music and dance, drawing on contemporary music, jazz and electro-acoustic music. She recently created Duo pour un violoncelle et un danseur, a coproduction with McGill University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT), a leading edge facility at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music.
She is currently on a research team that is examining the interface between art and science, and in May 2011 she travelled to Japan to participate in Plateforme, a transcultural laboratory where she began research on a body of work inspired by non-Western traditional dances, called Migrations.