In Dance: the Isadora goes to....

The achievements of BC’s dance artists were honoured at a ceremony held on September 12 at Scotiabank Dance Centre, as The Dance Centre announced Lola MacLaughlin and Noam Gagnon as recipients of the Isadora Awards for Excellence in Choreography and Excellence in Performance respectively.

The annual Isadora Awards, named after the great dance pioneer Isadora Duncan (1878-1927), were instituted by The Dance Centre in 1999 to recognize and celebrate the achievements of the dance profession in British Columbia. Members of the dance community are invited to nominate artists for the award, and an independent jury of professionals working in the field selects recipients based on specific criteria.

Lola MacLaughlin’s award for Excellence in Choreography is for her acclaimed work Provincial Essays, an ensemble piece inspired by our relationship with the natural world, which premiered at Scotiabank Dance Centre in 2007 and was subsequently featured at the Canada Dance Festival.  In a career which spans over 25 years, MacLaughlin has earned a reputation for her original and distinctive style, and her close collaborations with composers, artists and designers. Noam Gagnon receives the award for Excellence in Performance for his virtuoso tour de force in The Vision Impure. Best known as one half of the wildly successful The Holy Body Tattoo, Gagnon performed The Vision Impure, which featured works choreographed by himself and English dance artist Nigel Charnock. This work was the first project of his new company Co. Vision Selective; it premiered at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in 2007.

MacLaughlin and Gagnon each receive an Isadora Award – a sculpture specially created by the eminent glass artist Mary Filer – and fully subsidized rehearsal space at Scotiabank Dance Centre to the value of $500, plus $500 cash. Previous Isadora recipients have included Susan Elliott, Kathleen McDonagh, Anne Cooper, Peter Bingham, Chick Snipper, Crystal Pite, Joe Laughlin, Jai Govinda, Ron Stewart, Wen Wei Wang, Judith Garay and Alison Denham.

Artist Biographies

Lola MacLaughlin Prior to a career in dance, Lola MacLaughlin was a student of biology and psychology, and did a stint as a singer with a German rock band. MacLaughlin graduated from dance studies at Simon Fraser University and continued her training in New York, Toronto and Vancouver. Seminally influenced by studies at the Freie Universitat in Berlin, the punk movement of the early 1980’s and the German Ausdruckstanz, MacLaughlin’s first works were performed by EDAM, the radical Vancouver performance collective that she co-founded in 1983. Since 1989, she has been the artistic director of her own company, Lola Dance. The diverse body of work that she has developed since then has been recognized through The Banff Centre's Clifford E. Lee Award, The Canada Council's Jacqueline Lemieux Prize and the 2003 Candance Commission. The works Four Solos/Four Cities, fuse, and Volio have all toured nationally in recent years and Lola Dance has been seen at the Canada Dance Festival, the FIND Festival in Montreal and the 20th Danceweek Festival in Zagreb, Croatia. In May 2007, Lola Dance premiered Provincial Essays, an eclectic collection of choreographic landscapes for five dancers, which was most recently seen at the 2008 Canada Dance Festival in Ottawa. Lola is creating a new, full length work, Princes, Infanta, Queen, which will premiere in the fall of 2009.

Noam Gagnon As Co-Artistic Director and Choreographer of The Holy Body Tattoo, Noam Gagnon has created work that has received both critical and audience acclaim in Canada, the US, Asia and Europe. our brief eternity captured nominations in both dance categories of The Dora Mavor Moore Awards in 1997, winning Best Ensemble Performance, and has toured extensively, recently being performed at the Sydney Opera House in Australia. The film version of Poetry & Apocalypse has been screened in over 16 different international film festivals, winning several awards. Circa, which received the inaugural Alcan Performing Arts Award, has been performed over 100 times around the world, including at Ein Fest in Wuppertal in Germany at the invitation of Pina Bausch, and at London’s Barbican Theatre. Cine Qua Non’s film version of Circa was first broadcast on Bravo! Television in February 2005. monumental, The Holy Body Tattoo’s largest work to date, premiered in Ottawa in 2005 and since then has toured Canada and been featured as part of UCLA Live in Los Angeles. Gagnon has performed independently for leading choreographers from Canada and Europe and is also the Artistic Director of Co. Vision Selective and the Director of Noam Gagnon's Wellness Center/Beyond Pilates Inc. He is an Associate Dance Artist of Canada’s National Arts Centre.

The Dance Centre is BC’s resource centre for dance. It provides resources, information and support to the dance profession; runs performances and programs for artists and the public; and operates Scotiabank Dance Centre, Canada’s flagship dance facility, in downtown Vancouver.