October 26, 2004

What Happened to Kismet

Due to a minor technical problem with the video streams from our server Kismet is currently turned off to ease the load on our hosting server. We are working to resolve the situation and Kismet will be back online as soon as possible, sorry for the inconvenience.

October 08, 2004

Place Prize - Dance on the Cheap

Following the conclusion of the inaugural Place Prize competition in London several articles have appeared in the press and online praising the prize and the work created for it by 20 choreographers. Admittedly some of the pieces written are not much more than process stories, pieces written to fill gaps in the paper or just stating established facts with no real reporting involved.

Quoted in The Stage within a piece written by Katie Pelling, Raphael Bonachela the winner of the competition said; "Thanks to this award 20 choreographers have made 20 good pieces in the space of only a few months - that can only be a good thing.”

In the Independent Tim Wood speaking for The Place said; "We set out to do for dance what the Booker has done for fiction and the Turner Prize for visual arts. Dance has been the 'Cinderella art form' for too long. These creative artists are stars in their own right, albeit often modest stars, and this award is a liberating and unashamed celebration of high achievement."

Finally, Critical Dance member Julia Skene-Wenzel said in an online review; "Setting out to stir-up and boost Britain’s dance scene, the Place Prize has achieved what it set out to do – Britain is now richer with twenty new, highly professional dance pieces."

Here in the Lab we feel that most of these stories/reviews/comments are missing one very important point. In fact they are missing several important points which is only to be expected in this industry. First of all they all fail to note that The Place got to show a lot of new work for very little money. Of course the people that will benefit the least from this are the dancers who will have been paid poorly for their work and only a few weeks work if that.

We also take issue with Mr Wood's comments comparing the The Place Prize with the Turner Prize. The Turner Prize is almost universally derided by the general public, at least the ones who happen to know what it is, for being a colossally pretentious waste of time and money and nothing more than an attempt by the contemporary art world to stir up publicity no matter how negative that publicity happens to be. Contemporary Dance has enough problems dealing with incomprehensible pretension without adding more fuel to the fire.

Mr Bonachela may well be £25,000 better off but dance is still no where to be seen on the entertainment and media radar and we remain unconvinced that this very expensive publicity stunt has achieved anything tangible for dance.

It is also interesting to note that the Prize's own website still does not acknowledge that the competition is over or who won it. Can anyone at The Place say "communications"?