Linda Rabin

2022 Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award (Dance)

Dancer, teacher, choreographer and somatic movement educator

A pioneer of contemporary dance in Canada, Linda Rabin has more than 50 years of experience as a dancer, teacher and choreographer. As a somatic movement educator, she helps artists and individuals from all backgrounds realize their personal and creative processes, both onstage and in their daily lives. An explorer by nature, she has travelled widely and is keenly interested in the cultures and rituals of different countries. As a workshop leader across Canada and internationally, she generously shares her lifelong passion: exploring movement as art, as a transformational process, and as a healing and spiritual practice.
 
Ms. Rabin was born in 1946 in Montréal, where she studied creative modern dance with Elsie Salomons. After graduating from New York’s prestigious Juilliard School, she worked for Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company and London’s Ballet Rambert, and studied various movement, theatre and voice techniques.
 
In 1981, with colleague Candace Loubert, she founded Les ateliers de danse moderne de Montréal inc. (now the École de danse contemporaine de Montréal), one of Canada’s foremost contemporary dance schools.
 
Ms. Rabin has taught and choreographed at leading dance companies and institutions in Canada and internationally, including Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers, Dancemakers, Batsheva Dance Company and Nederlands Dans Theater 2. She has performed in the choreographies of such prominent Canadian artists as Daniel Léveillé, Jean-Sébastien Lourdais, Aurélie Pedron, Mélanie Demers, and Tedd Robinson and Margie Gillis. Among her career highlights is the performance of her iconic work The White Goddess, a ritualistic ensemble piece inspired by Robert Graves’s book of the same name, an unconventional treatise on mythology from a decidedly feminist angle.
 
She is a certified practitioner of Body-Mind Centering® and an authorized teacher of Continuum, a practice she studied under its founder, Emilie Conrad, that remains at the heart of her work. Of her introduction to Continuum, Ms. Rabin recalls, “I understood in that moment that this is what I was called to do. I was seeing and feeling within my body the inner source of movement. I interpreted this experience as ‘the diamond essence of dance’.”
 
Linda Rabin is a Member of the Order of Canada, a Distinguished Member of Quebec’s Order of Excellence in Education, and a laureate of the Prix Contribution exceptionnelle de la danse de Montréal.