Lola McLaughlin

Prior to her life in dance, Lola MacLaughlin was a student of biology and psychology, and did a stint as a singer with a German rock band. She graduated from dance studies at Simon Fraser University and continued her training in New York, Toronto and Vancouver. Seminally influenced by her studies at the Freie Universitat in Berlin, the punk movement of the early 1980s and the German Ausdruckstanz, MacLaughlin’s first works were performed by EDAM, the radical Vancouver performance collective that she co-founded in 1983. In 1989, she started her own company, Lola Dance. The diverse body of work that she developed with Lola Dance has been recognized through The Banff Centre’s Clifford E. Lee Award, The Canada Council’s Jacqueline Lemieux Prize and the 2003 Candance Commission. McLaughlin died in March 2009.