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Dateline: 17th April, 2011
Place Prize Winner Announced The winner of the prestigious Place Prize and £25,000 in prize money has been announced. The Place Prize for dance, sponsored by Bloomberg, is the leading competition for UK-based choreographers. It is a competition for commissioned works, and competing choreographers are given funds, free studio time and technical support to create their work. The competition was launched in 2004 and runs biennially. Since April 6th the four finalists have nightly presented their work in front of audiences in the Robin Howard Theatre at The Place. Each night the audience has awarded a prize of £1,000 to their chosen winner, and last night (16th April) the panel of judges (gallery director Hannah Barry, performance poet and musician Zena Edwards, theatre director Rupert Goold, Streetwise Opera CEO Matthew Peacock and director of Dublin Dance Festival, Laurie Uprichard) gave the overall prize of £25,000 to Lost Dog and their production It Needs Horses.
Ben Duke & Raquel Meseguer who work as Lost Dog, were the recipients of a Bonnie Bird New Choreographers Award in 2005 and the Robin Howard Commission in 2007. From the outset their work has been in demand, and has been toured by Phoenix Dance Theatre, From Here to Maturity, Transitions Dance Company, EDge and Scottish Dance Theatre. It needs horses is about the nature of live entertainment and features a memorably down at heel ringmaster, his glamorously bedraggled assistant and their increasingly extreme measures to draw the crowds.
Eddie Nixon, Director of Theatre and Artist Development at The Place and Chair of The Place Prize judges, said, "It Needs Horses is both funny and serious, accessible and challenging. Lost Dog have been making works of this calibre and intelligence for a few years now, and I hope that this prize will help them continue. I'm delighted for Ben and Raquel.
"The judges have ultimately selected the work that has also proved to be the audience's favourite in their nightly votes. Yet, just as It Needs Horses did not win over 50% of the overall audience vote, it was similarly extremely difficult for the judges to chose their winner. That's a testament to the quality of all the finalists, and I'm sure that, as in previous years, all the works and artists will go on to further success." The four finalists were Eva Recacha (Begin to Begin: a piece about dead ends), Ben Duke & Raquel Meseguer (It Needs Horses), Riccardo Buscarini & Antonio de la Fe Guedes (Cameo) and Freddie Opoku-Addaie & Frauke Requardt (Fidelity Project). They were selected last September from nearly 200 entries, and 16 commissioned works by a group of panellists that included choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh, dance journalist Sanjoy Roy, choreographer Janet Smith, Alistair Spalding from Sadler’s Wells and Laurie Uprichard from Dublin Dance Festival. In the past, the competition has brought leading artists including Rafael Bonachela, Hofesh Shechter and Bawren Tavaziva to national and international attention.
Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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