Karen Kain

Karen Kain (born March 28, 1951, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian ballet dancer who became one of Canada’s finest and most internationally renowned dancers and a respected public figure. She continued working with the National Ballet of Canada (NBC) beyond her retirement as a ballerina, eventually serving as the company’s artistic director (2005–21).

Early career

Kain trained at the National Ballet School of Canada from 1962 and graduated into the NBC in 1969. In January 1971 she made her debut in the challenging role of the Swan Queen in Swan Lake, and she was promoted to principal rank the same year. In 1973 she won the women’s silver medal and, with Frank Augustyn, the prize for the best pas de deux at the Moscow International Ballet competition. Rudolf Nureyev, the great Soviet-trained dancer who had staged The Sleeping Beauty for the company in 1972, took a special interest in Kain and Augustyn and helped accelerate their rapid ascent to fame as Canada’s favourite dance partnership, “the gold-dust twins.” Kain also appeared frequently with Nureyev in guest engagements around the world.

National and international success

Her strong technique, breadth of movement, sensitive musicality, daring attack, and versatile dramatic ability were shown to advantage in both classical and contemporary works. During her 28 years of dancing with the National Ballet, Kain accumulated an exceptionally large repertoire that included all the major full-length ballerina roles and an extraordinarily varied range of leading roles in shorter works. She infused such traditional roles as Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty, the Swan Queen, and the title role in Giselle with personal distinctiveness. She brought heartbreaking intensity to John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet and a vivid sense of romantic comedy to Frederick Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée. From early in her career, choreographers were eager to create roles for her, including the celebrated Frenchman Roland Petit, with whose Ballet National de Marseille Kain performed as a guest artist for almost a decade from 1974. Her loyalties, however, were firmly entrenched in Canada and the National Ballet, facts that helped endear her to the public and made Kain a household name.

With her home company, she created a steady stream of roles in ballets such as Ann Ditchburn’s Mad Shadows; Constantin Patsalas’s Rite of Spring, Sinfonia, and Oiseaux exotiques; Glen Tetley’s Alice, La Ronde, and Tagore; John Alleyne’s Time Out with Lola; Christopher House’s Café Dances; John Neumeier’s Now and Then; and Dominique Dumais’s Tides of Mind. She forged a particularly strong creative relationship with James Kudelka, originating roles in Rape of Lucrece, Musings, The Miraculous Mandarin, Spring Awakening, and The Actress.

Retirement from the stage

Kain’s performing career lasted well beyond the norm for ballerinas. Although she relinquished major roles to which she felt herself no longer suited, her dancing beyond age 40 blossomed into new dimensions of creativity, dramatic complexity, and emotional depth. Nevertheless, in 1996 Kain announced her intention to retire as a full-time principal dancer with the company, prompting the impresario Garth Drabinsky to celebrate her accomplishments by producing a cross-Canada farewell tour in the summer and early fall of 1997. Kain continued to dance for another year, frequently with the senior company of Nederlands Dans Theater, NDT3, and in a variety of galas.

She then accepted artistic director James Kudelka’s invitation to rejoin the National Ballet in 1998 with the title artist-in-residence, amended to artistic associate in 2000. Although she did reappear on stage as Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet, Kain focused her efforts on coaching the dancers, staging select works from the repertoire, fundraising, and contributing generally as a member of the senior executive management team. When Kudelka abruptly resigned in May 2005, Kain, amid general approbation, was soon named as his successor. She served as artistic director until 2021.

Onscreen appearances and honours

Frequent television specials and other appearances reinforced Kain’s celebrity. She starred in Norman Campbell’s TV productions of Giselle, La Fille mal gardée, The Merry Widow, La Ronde, and Alice. She became the subject of several documentaries, among them Anthony Azzopardi’s Making Ballet, based on The Actress, and David Langer’s CBC Life and Times documentary, also based on The Actress. She was featured in Veronica Tennant’s Karen Kain: Dancing in the Moment for CBC television, which won an International Emmy Award in 1999.

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Kain received honorary degrees from numerous universities, including York, McMaster, Trent, UBC, Brock, and the University of Toronto. In 1976 she was named Officer of the Order of Canada (promoted to Companion of the Order in 1991), and in 1996 she became the first Canadian to receive the Cartier Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2000 the French government named her Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She received the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for lifetime artistic achievement in dance in 2002. In 2011 she received the Distinguished Artist Award from the International Society for the Performing Arts.

Community involvement

Throughout her career Kain worked in a voluntary capacity for a variety of charitable organizations and public institutions, among them the Kidney Foundation, the Toronto Humane Society, and Foster Parents Plan Canada. Notably, she was founding president of the Dancer Transition Resource Centre, created to assist dancers in planning for and accomplishing a smooth transition from stage performance to a new career. Kain acted as chair of the board of the Canada Council for the Arts from 2004 to 2008. The Karen Kain School of the Arts, so named by Toronto elementary-school children to honour her career-long contributions to the arts, opened in 2008.

The original version of this entry was published by The Canadian Encyclopedia .