Keir Choreographic Award 2020

Organisations. Carriageworks, Dancehouse

Year: 2020

This biennial Australian choreographic award was launched in 2014, it was formed through a partnership between Dancehouse, Melbourne; Carriageworks, Sydney and the Keir Foundation. It is dedicated to commissioning new short works and promoting innovation, experimentation and cross-artform practices in contemporary dance while providing significant support to the contemporary dance sector in Australia. The aim of the award is to increase the profile of, and cultivate new audiences for, contemporary dance both within Australia and internationally by commissioning and presenting new choreographic works in a competitive context, while also fostering debate around choreographic practice in Australia.

Choreography today invites a rethinking and reframing of relations between space, time, language, presence, aesthetics and ethics. The Keir Choreographic Award aims to capture the new choreographic territories evolving in the realm of movement art and performance that explore the very specific body-mind states artists have been increasingly concerned with throughout the last decade.

The Keir Choreographic Award welcomes choreographic ideas for works that reflect the interconnectivity between disciplines and challenge conventions about what the moving body is or can be in contemporary society. It hopes to foster new understandings of what choreography might become. Applications for the award are assessed by a panel and eight selected artists are commissioned to develop their work. Commissioned artists received a fee, a production budget and in-kind space proportionate to the scale of their project.

The 2020 Keir Choreographic Award jury are:
Paola Bala (AUS)
Lucinda Child (USA)
Mette Edvardsen (NO)
Serge Laurent (FR)
Takao Kawaguchi (JP)

The key dates for the 2020 Award are as follows:
Submissions close: 14 July 2019
Commissioned Choreographers announced: 1 October 2019
Semi Finals: Dancehouse, Melbourne, 3-7 March 2020
Finals: Carriageworks, Sydney, 12-14 March 2020