As always with Article19 the controversy seems to come from the things that you would least expect it come from.
Step forward our four sentences on the New Adventures Choreography Award (NACA) pointing out that the main winner (and a runner up, although not mentioned in the piece) are both connected to New Adventures.
29 comments in and it didn’t seem to be dying down so let’s try and clarify here, shall we.
First of all; You cannot, under any circumstances, run a competition which has an open application process, allow former or current employees to enter that competition, have that competition be judged by, among others, current company members, and then award the winning prize to two people connected to the company.
You can’t do all that and expect cynical old us, here in TheLab™, not to look at it and go “huh?”
Let’s give you a couple of examples, both real and imagined.
If a newspaper runs a competition they have strict rules on employees, former employees, family members, pets, etc from taking part. The reason being is that if any of those excluded groups win it will look fishy. No matter how legitimately they may have won the prize, it just looks wrong.
Now let’s imagine that this award didn’t come from New Adventures but from Arts Council England (ACE). There are two grants up for grabs and 100 people apply for the grants.
Twelve weeks later ACE announces the names of the successful applicants for the grants and it turns out that both of them are children of senior members of Arts Council England. Would you, our dear readers, expect us to not mention that little snippet of information in our coverage? Yes or no?
Some are interpreting our piece in Quick Bits as an “attack” on the winners of this prize, which it isn’t and the reason that you know that it isn’t is because we just told you it isn’t.
The people responsible for this nonsense are Matthew Bourne and New Adventures who apparently don’t know their ass from their elbow when it comes to running a simple competition.
At the very least, all New Adventures staff should have recused themselves from having anything to do with the judging when it became clear that dance makers connected to New Adventures were applying.
But they didn’t, so here we are! Life’s a beach and then somebody kicks sand in your face, or something.