Cardston-born dancer to be honoured this weekend

By Heather Cameron SOUTHERN ALBERTA NEWSPAPERS Local Journalism Initiative Reporter on November 8, 2024.

Courtesy of Dance Collection Danse Grant Strate watches during a rehearsal at the National Ballet of Canada in the 1960s. The Cardston-born dancer, choreographer, and educator Grant Strate is set to be posthumously inducted into the sixth Annual Dance Collection Danse Hall of Fame.

Cardston-born dancer, choreographer, and educator Grant Strate is set to be posthumously inducted into the sixth Annual Dance Collection Danse Hall of Fame on Sunday at the Palais Royale in Toronto, Ontario.

In addition to that, Strait will be posthumously recognized with the Trailblazer Award.

“When we do our annual Hall of Fame recognizing dance luminaries in the country, we always have a Trailblazers section to highlight those people who are no longer with us, but have made a significant impact, and Grant is really known as the great statesman of dance in Canada,” said Amy Bowring, the Executive and Curatorial Director at Dance Collection Danse.

“He was quite remarkable and in fact, unparalleled in what he accomplished in his lifetime. A lot of the things that he did really create a foundation for the dance ecology that we have in the country now.”

Strate, Bowring says, was born in 1927 and died in 2015. During his life, Bowring says, Strate studied law at the University of Alberta while also studying dance.

“He started off as training as a lawyer at the University of Alberta, and while he was there, he studied dance with an Estonian, post-war immigrant. She had been a displaced person and was able to get to Alberta. Her name was Laine Metz. He started to do recreational dance with her at the University and just had a real flair for it. He had actually passed the bar in Edmonton when Celia Franca, who is the founding artistic director of the National Valley of Canada, went on a Western Canada audition tour in the summer of 1951, he auditioned for her in Edmonton, and she brought him into the company primarily as a choreographer because he didn’t have much ballet training,” said Bowring.

“He really had modern dance training, but he had a real eye for choreography. And so he was a charter member of the National Ballet of Canada in 1951 and was its first resident choreographer. He was there for 20 years, and then he founded the dance program at York University, which is the first degree-granting university program for dance in the country. He used to joke that he exchanged one bar for another barre.”

After Strate started that program, Bowring stated, other universities initiated dance programs including the University of Calgary, and eventually Simon Fraser University.

“They were cropping up all over the place after he started the program at York, and starting that program is what kicked off what we call the 1970’s dance boom, because with this level of post-secondary training for dance in Canada, we were suddenly turning out all kinds of professional dancers, and we weren’t losing them to England and the United States,” said Bowring.

“It led to dance being the fastest growing art form in the country in the 1970s, and while he was running the dance program at York University, he also initiated the Dance in Canada Association, which was sort of a communication support advocacy organization for dance, and he also started the National Choreographic seminars, which really did a lot to hone choreographic talent in Canada.”

Bowring emphasizes that all of Strate’s work a very significant impact on the development of dance in Canada.

In the 1980s, Bowring says, Strate went on to lead the program at the School of Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, and also participated in all kinds of committees, awards committees and advocacy groups and the world dance associations.

“He was always really heavily involved,” said Bowring. “He mentored so many different groups and individuals over the time of his career, and I would say the things that he accomplished, we have yet to see someone at the same level since it was really groundbreaking work that has had a long impact is still having an impact on the art form.”

The honour, Bowring says, is highly deserved.

“He had a deep impact on the development of dance in Canada overall, and we still feel their effects, so it is a very well-deserved induction, and, and I’m sorry that we weren’t doing the Hall of Fame when he was still alive and we could do it in person,” said Bowring.

Bowring says that Strate’s romantic partner, fellow National Ballet dancer Earl Kraul, was supportive of his work. Kraul, Bowring says, was a principal dancer in the company and actually quite a famous dancer as well.

“They were together a good 40 or so years,” said Bowring. “They spent their entire lives together after meeting at the ballet in the ’50s. They were a terrific team. Earl was quite a famous principal ballet dancer and then he also taught at York University. Then, when they moved to Vancouver in the 80’s, he taught at a variety of studio studios. They were very well respected.”

Strate, Bowring says, truly had a selfless approach to dance.

“He really was a visionary thinker, and he was always thinking about the dance community, and all of his works were to the benefit of everyone in the dance community in Canada. He had a very selfless approach to his work. It was really about elevating dancers and the dance form.”

Bowring says that Strate was highly respected by all who met him, and he’s still quite revered in the dance community, even though he has been gone a long time.

“One of the aims with the Hall of Fame is to educate the public about the people who have made significant contributions to dance in Canada,” said Bowring. “This gives him a permanent place on the Hall of Fame website so that future generations can look and reflect on what he did,”

Bowring says that Dance Collection Danse also published Strate’s memoir many years ago and that memoir is currently on sale on the Danse Collection Dance website: https://dcd.ca/product/grant-strate-a-memoir/.

“That’s another way that we’ve helped to secure his legacy,” said Bowring.