Rachel Browne founded Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers  in 1964 and served as the company’s Artistic Director, resident choreographer and teacher for over twenty years.  Under her direction the company grew from a local amateur group to a nationally recognized repertory company significant in the development of modern dance in Canada.

Rachel provided opportunities for a number of Canadian choreographers to develop and mount their works on the Company.  These included Stephanie Ballard, Ruth Cansfield, David Earle, Karen Jamieson, Judith Marcuse, Jennifer Mascal, Gaile Petursson-Hiley, Paula Ravitz, Tedd Robinson and others.

Rachel remains active as a choreographer, teacher and performer.  She continues to create dances of quality and relevance for WCD, the Professional Program of the School of Contemporary Dancers, and independent projects.  Her work has influenced generations of dancers whom she has trained and directed.

Rachel has received numerous awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, the Winnipeg Arts Council and private foundations.  These include the 1995 Jean A. Chalmers Award for Creativity in Dance, the 2000 Canada Council Jacqueline Lemieux Prize and the 2001 Manitoba Arts Council Great-West Life Lifetime Achievement Award.  In 1997 she was appointed as a Member of the Order of Canada.  Rachel Browne’s biography, Dancing Toward the Light, by acclaimed dance artist and writer Carol Anderson, was published in 1999.

Sunstorm (2002), done to Chopin’s Twenty-Four Preludes, was remounted for WCD’s 40th Anniversary season in May 2004.  Sunstorm was also presented at the 2004 Dancing on the Edge Festival in Vancouver and the 2003 Stream of Dance Festival in Regina.  This recent creation received national attention with favourable reviews in the Globe and Mail by Paula Citron and Dance International, by Kaija Pepper.

Rachel’s current activities include creating works for senior dance artists as part of her ongoing project, Older Women Dance.  Edgelit, featuring six senior dance artists, premiered at WCD’s 35th Anniversary Festival in 1999 and was produced in Toronto by Danceworks in 2000.  Rachel’s recent creations include Flowering (2005), an intergenerational work, Mein Ruhe Platz(2006), done to klezmer music, and Variations on Serenity, to music by Canadian composer Ann Southam, which opened WCD’s 42nd season on September 28, 2006.       

Rachel’s most recent undertakings include performing Flowering with Odette Heyn-Penner, Co-Director of The School of Contemporary Dancers, at the Older and Reckless series in Toronto, March 2007.  Ceremonies, Rachel’s newest piece, done to Ann Southam’s ‘Seastill’, premiered November 2007.  Ceremonies was commissioned by three WCD dancers in an independent project entitled Transformations.

photo: Boris Minkevich / Winnipeg Free Press
Rachel Browne in Flowering
2008