Keir Choreographic Award 2014
Artists. Atlanta Eke, Brooke Stamp, James Batchelor, Jane McKernan, Matthew Day, Sarah Aiken, Shaun Gladwell, Tim Darbyshire
Organisations. Carriageworks, Dancehouse
Year: 2014
This biennial Australian choreographic award was launched in 2014, it 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 commissioned works are presented in a four day season at Dancehouse, Melbourne. The jury then selects four of these works to go forward to the finals which are presented at Carriageworks, Sydney. A $30,000 cash prize is awarded to the winner selected by the jury, while $10,000 is awarded to the People’s Choice winner selected by the audience at Carriageworks.
The 2014 Keir Choreographic Award was won by Atlanta Eke.
The finalists were: Sarah Aiken (VIC), Matthew Day (VIC), Jane McKernan (NSW) and Atlanta Eke (VIC).
The 2014 jury was: Mårten Spångberg (Sweden) – the acclaimed ‘bad boy’ of contemporary dance pushing the boundaries of the art form in polite society, Matthew Lyons (USA) – curator at experimental cultural hub The Kitchen in New York, Josephine Ridge (Australia) – Creative Director of Melbourne Festival and one of Australia’s most experienced arts identities, Becky Hilton (Australia) – a leading Australian choreographer, director and teacher for festivals and companies nationally and internationally and Phillip Keir (Australia) – The Keir Foundation Director and founder of the Award.
The eight commissioned artists in 2014 were: Sarah Aiken, James Batchelor, Tim Darbyshire, Matthew Day, Shaun Gladwell, Jane McKernan, Atlanta Eke and Brooke Stamp.
