Canadian dance pioneer, SFU School for the Contemporary Arts professor emeritus, and elder statesman of the Vancouver dance scene Grant Strate has died at 87.

The one-time dancer and resident choreographer for the National Ballet of Canada and founder/director of York University's dance program succumbed to cancer on February 9. "Grant passed away peacefully at home last night, Feb 9 after a short battle with cancer," companion and local dancer Wen Wei Wang posted on Facebook. "I was at his side and am comforted knowing that he was not suffering. Grant lived a long and eventful life and touched so many people. He was much loved and will be sadly missed."

The Alberta-born Strate achieved several lifetimes' worth of work in his 87 years—so much that it is difficult to summarize in a single article.

As Mirna Zagar, executive director of the Dance Centre, puts it: "For a man who had such a long, eventful life and contributed so many things, words can't describe how much he will be missed." She adds: "We don't see these kinds of renaissance people around a lot these days."

She points out he was a founding member of the Dance Centre, seeing it through to having its own building constructed in downtown Vancouver, and sitting on its board till his death. "He was one of the key visionaries toward building what we now know as the Scotiabank Dance Centre."

His contribution to education in dance was equally profound, founding the school at York and helping to launch SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts and running its national choreographic seminars. 

Strate himself explained his approach to teaching to the Straight, in 2007, on the eve of an 80th-birthday celebration of his life at the Scotiabank Dance Centre: "There are some things I often say, and one is that I think in every class you teach, students should be reminded why they want to dance in the first place," he explained. "It should not all be academe; there should also be pleasure. I think also that in teaching, the best information is that which is discovered. So a teacher should set up a situation where their students must solve the problem, although they can help them do it. The responsibility is both ways: it's not to paste learning on them; it's to bring it out of them."

"He's a pillar," former student Jill Henis said in the same article. "He's incredibly revered and looked up to."

"He would explore young artists' work with equal interest to seeing a senior colleague," Zagar recalls, adding Strate was credited with modernizing the National Ballet of Canada. "For him there was no distinction between ballet and contemporary: it was all dance. And he always found the time to listen to the challenges that the dance artists have, looking also at what solutions could be found to support dance in general, whether it was education, or a building, or building bridges across Canada and the world," she says, adding he was president of the World Dance Alliance from 1999 to 2003.

Strate's influence in education also spans the globe, after he guest-taught around North America, Asia and Europe, from New York’s Juilliard School to the Laban Centre in London to the Beijing Dance Academy. In his later years, he spent more and more time in China, once telling the Straight, "The thing that came out in the ballet classes that I was teaching [in China] was that they had somehow mixed the Russian method with their own, and it looked like calligraphy to me. It was more gentle, it was more poetic, it was more beautiful. I liked what they had evolved."

Strate, a long-time, passionate arts advocate, also helped found the Dance in Canada Association to provide service and advocacy. "When he looked at complex situations he was always passionate and thoughtful," Zagar said. "He spoke his mind openly, even if it might offend someone. And when others depaired he would see a bright future."

Strate's numerous honours over the years include the Jean A. Chalmers Award for Creativity in Dance (1993), the Order of Canada (1995), the Governor General's Performing Arts Award (1996), and an Honorary Doctor of Laws Degree from Simon Fraser University in 1999.

Memorial plans had not been announced at press time.