Born July 6, 1946 in Spirit Wood Saskatchewan, to French Canadian and Cree Metis parents, Rabu grew up as a Francophone in rural Saskatchewan. He attended high school and began studying ballet in Kamloops, BC. The day he wrote his final high school exam, he was on the bus to San Francisco to train at The San Francisco Ballet on a Ford Foundation Scholarship.

In 1969 Rabu joined Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. The company was on tour and Renald was dancing in Brian MacDonald's Time Out of Mind when he suffered the injury that ended his career in 1974. He was twenty-seven.

Two years later, after several free lance commissions, he joined Pacific Ballet Theatre in Vancouver as resident choreographer, becoming artistic director in 1980, the same year he won the Clifford E. Lee Choreography Award. Rabu

created many ballets for PBT, among them a beautiful pas de deux, The Birth of Eve, (1981), designed by BC Aboriginal artist Roy Vickers, in which Rabu acknowledged and expressed his own Aboriginal heritage.

In 1984 Rabu returned to Montreal. As ballet master and rehearsal director for La La La Human Steps between 1986 and 1990, he was responsible for introducing ballet into the company's aesthetic and technique.

Full of fun and warm humour, Rabu loved the ballet, yet he was never haughty. He toured his low budget ballet company to communities along The Prince George Highway with a genuine joy and respect for his artists and his audiences which they returned in kind. His work wasn't popular amongst mandarins though. It lacked the avantgarde chill that was fashionable in the eighties. Rabu was alas, too popular in small towns, at a time when that killed a career and neither high earned revenue nor an Aboriginal background counted for any points in Ottawa. Peter Lougheed once said of him, "He's my favourite choreographer. He's the only one that doesn't bore me stiff."

Renald Rabu died in Montreal of AIDS on February 29, 1992. He was forty-six.

From one spark comes others.
Many sparks creating energy,
Developing into flame.
Flame that swirls, reaches out
beckoning, attracting, sucking, enveloping
destroying each
Becoming one
flickering red glowing mass.
 - Marilyn Zeitlin

Return to the complete Clifford E. Lee Choreography Award Winners List

Sparks (1980)

World Premiere, Eric Harvie Theatre
August 15 & 16, 1980

Choreography: Renald Rabu
Music: Quenten Doolittle: Music for Oedipus
Costume Design: Mary Jo Pollak
Decor: Laszlo Funtek
Lighting Design: Scott Laurence

Thomas Teague, Natasha Hosein, Leslie Howard, Michael Fritzke in Sparks.
Photo: Kathleen Watt