The Dance Centre announces Company 605 co-artistic directors and Margaret Grenier as 2024 winners of Lola Award and Isadora Award
Lisa Mariko Gelley and Josh Martin receive $10,000 biennial prize, while Dancers of Damelahamid executive and artistic director wins $5,000 annual award
Lisa Mariko Gelley. Photo by Max Tamoto
Josh Martin. Photo by Max Tamoto
Margaret Grenier. Photo by Chris Randle
THE DANCE CENTRE has just announced this year’s winners of two major local dance prizes, the biennial Lola Award and annual Isadora Award, which reward the achievements of talented B.C. choreographers.
Lisa Mariko Gelley and Josh Martin, co-artistic directors of Company 605, secured the $10,000 Lola Award for mid-career and senior choreographers. As partners in dance and life, the pair have co-created numerous works over the last two decades, which include Inheritor Recordings, Vital Few, Anthem, Loop, Lull, and After We Glow (a striking sci-fi duet that premiered as part of Ballet BC’s Unfold + Give program in 2021).
Most recently, Company 605 premiered its new work lossy at this year’s Dancing on the Edge Festival in a copresentation with SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs (which announced its imminent closure at the end of May). For 14 years, Martin and Gelley have also presented HOLD ON LET GO (previously named PushOFF) festival programming in Vancouver in partnership with Theatre Replacement.
Another prize, the $5,000 Isadora Award, was given to Margaret Grenier, executive and artistic director of the Dancers of Damelahamid. The company was founded by Grenier’s late parents, respected Cree Elder Margaret Harris and former Gitxsan chief Kenneth Harris, after the Potlatch Ban was lifted in the 1960s. Dancers of Damelahamid’s mandate was (and still remains) to ensure the preservation of Indigenous arts and culture.
Since 2008, Grenier has also produced the Coastal Dance Festival, which celebrates the stories, songs, and dances of Indigenous peoples along the Northwest Coast. Her choreographic works—which span Setting the Path (her first production after taking the reins of the company in 2003), Spirit and Tradition, Visitors Who Never Left, Luu hlotitxw, Flicker, and Mînowin—have been performed nationally and internationally over a period of more than two decades.
In 2020, Grenier was awarded the prestigious $50,000 Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts by the Canada Council for the Arts. The following year at the Coastal Dance Festival she presented Raven Song, a video work filmed during the pandemic to honour her late mother. Grenier will further celebrate her mother’s legacy at The Cultch this November with an ambitious full-scale live dance performance titled Raven Mother, which draws upon generations of knowledge, artistic practice, and culture.
The Dance Centre has been presenting the Isadora Award, named after the late dance pioneer Isadora Duncan, to accomplished B.C. dance professionals since 1999. From 2012 onward it has also been administering the Lola Award, which is supported by the Lola McLaughlin Endowment Fund with the Vancouver Foundation and named for the beloved late Vancouver dance artist. 
Related Articles
