Judges Announced for The Place Prize Finals

The judging panel of the Place Prize Finals, the UK's biggest and most prestigious choreography prize, will include: 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.

The running order for the Finals has also been announced:
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)
Freddie Opoku-Addaie & Frauke Requardt (Fidelity Project)

All four works will be performed each night of The Place Prize Finals from 6 -16 April. The audience will award a nightly prize of £1,000 for their favourite work using an electronic voting system, while an overall winner, selected by a distinguished panel of judges, will win £25,000 after the final performance on 16 April.

The judging panel is drawn from five different strands of the arts, including music, theatre, dance, visual art and opera.

Hannah Barry runs Hannah Barry Gallery, specialising in new art across two spaces in London, in Peckham and Bond Street. In 2007 she founded Bold Tendencies, a non-profit summertime sculpture project in South London dedicated to showcasing new art by International Artists. She is a trustee of Aurora Orchestra, part of the Patron's Circle of Michael Clark Company and a Trustee of The White Review, a London-based magazine and platform for a new generation of writers, thinkers and artists.

Zena Edwards is a performance poet, writer and musician. Her vibrant poetry is inspired by her experiences of travel, particularly through Africa, as well as traditional African music and song. Zena has performed at WOMAD, The London Jazz Festival, Poetry International at the Royal Festival Hall, The URB Hip Hop Festival (Helsinki), Glastonbury and many others.

Rupert Goold is Artistic Director of Headlong Theatre and an Associate Director of
the RSC. Recent productions for Headlong include Earthquakes in London at the National Theatre and Enron in the West End and on Broadway, for which he won the 2009 Olivier, Evening Standard and Critics' Circle Awards for Best Director.

Matthew Peacock is the founder and CEO of Streetwise Opera, a charity that uses music to help homeless people move forward in their lives. Streetwise Opera runs a music programme every week in 11 homeless centres around the UK and stages professional opera productions. Its acclaimed productions have garnered a Royal Philharmonic Music Society Award and toured worldwide to venues in Europe and Asia, including the Royal Festival Hall and the Edinburgh International Film Festival

Laurie Uprichard is Director of the Dublin Dance Festival. A former dancer, she performed with Kei Takei's Moving Earth, as well as with Irene Feigenheimer, Barbara Roan and Wendy Woodson. A former Managing Director and Co-Producer of Dance Theater Workshop, she was Executive Director of Danspace Project in New York from 1992 - 2007, before leaving to join the Dublin Dance Festival.

Eddie Nixon, Director of Theatre and Artist Development at The Place said: "The Place Prize is a competition for dance that is both based on clever ideas and is eager to engage the audience. I am looking forward to working with this wonderful line up of judges. I've no doubt their experience as artists and curators from music, theatre, opera, visual arts, poetry and dance will help us choose a very worthy winner from this year's four exceptional finalists"

The four finalists of The Place Prize were selected from nearly 200 entries and 16 commissioned works. They premiered at The Place in September 2010.

The Place Prize has changed the contemporary dance landscape in Britain. Created in 2004 as a biennial competition to support the creation of new work, it is the biggest single source of commissions for Britain's independent choreographers. By the conclusion of this fourth edition, The Place Prize will have enabled the creation of 76 works and invested over a staggering £1 million in new dance.

The Place Prize has served as a launch pad for many choreographic careers. The competition has brought leading artists including Rafael Bonachela, Hofesh Shechter and Bawren Tavaziva, amongst others to national and international attention.

The Place: Robin Howard Dance Theatre
17 Duke's Road, London WC1H 9PY

Box Office: 020 7121 1100 / www.theplaceprize.com
Tickets: £6 - £25

The Place Prize for dance, sponsored by Bloomberg
The Finals
Wed 6 - Sat 9 & Mon 11 - Sat 16 April 2011, 8pm
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
Freddie Opoku-Addaie & Frauke Requardt Fidelity Project

The Place
For over forty years, The Place has shaped where dance is going next: engaging with audiences and participants, championing the best ideas, and creating inspiring conditions for artists and enthusiasts to realise their potential. The Place combines London Contemporary Dance School, Richard Alston Dance Company and the Robin Howard Dance Theatre, together with pioneering learning, teaching, outreach, recreation and professional development projects. Our approaches to participation, education, creation and performance inform each other, respond to today's world, and embrace risks. Our goals for the future build on the achievements of our history: to transform and enrich lives, to continue to create the future of dance. www.theplace.org.uk

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