The Rose Prize for International Dance

Choreographers from around the world compete for the brand new Rose International Dance Prize at Sadler’s Wells, London
Dance making is a special craft. True, anybody can string together a few steps, link a series of movements; but few can do so with the kind of artistry that compels an audience.
Those who can deserve praise and encouragement – and that’s what the brand new Rose International Dance Prize aims to do. Kicking off this week (29 Jan 2025) at Sadler’s Wells, the prize is financed by an anonymous donor to reward good/interesting choreography from around the world; and as the initiative came from Sadler’s Wells, I asked its Chief Executive and Artistic Director, Sir Alistair Spalding, to tell me how it had come about.

Sir Alistair Spalding. Photo: Cameron Slater
“I’ve always wanted to do something like this, but we didn’t have the money; but one day a donor, the Rose donor, rang me up and said, ‘have you ever thought of doing a choreographic prize?’ And I said, ‘yes, but we lack the resources’. The person said, ‘I’ll cover that’.
“So then we had the opportunity, and that’s really how it started.”
It’s a huge commitment: financial cover for ten biennial iterations of the competition split into two categories: the Rose Prize, worth £40,000, for works of 50 minutes or more by established choreographers; and the Bloom Prize, worth £15,000, for emerging choreographers with a maximum 10 years’ experience.
Aiming to garner for dance awards the prestige of the Turner prize for visual arts, the Rose is truly international:
“We had nominators in each of the continents”, Sir Alistair explained. “They chose work from their region, for example, South America, and they nominated two things that they’d seen from their region. They could also nominate one thing from outside of the region, so they had three proposals.
“We collected all of those and then another group of people selected the seven finalists from that wider list.”
For London dance audiences one name stands out from the shortlist: the African American Kyle Abraham, whose work we have seen at both Sadler’s Wells and the Royal Opera House, where he’s been commissioned by The Royal Ballet.

Rose Prize: Kyle Abraham, An Untitled Love. Image: Christopher Duggan
Other Rose Prize contenders we are less familiar with, though Lia Rodrigues, who works in the Rio favelas of her native Brazil, is well established; she is joined on the shortlist by Christos Papadopoulos, from Greece and Marco da Silva Ferreira, from Portugal.
The three Bloom Prize finalists come from France – Leila Ka; Israel- Stav Struz Boutros; and Taiwan – Wang Yeu-Kwn.
I was interested to see that the word ‘community’ features prominently in the descriptions of quite a few of the finalists’ works; for example, Marco da Silva Ferreira’s Carcaça.

Rose Prize: Marco da Silva Ferreira, Carcaça. Image: José Caldeira
I wondered whether focus on community participation had been part of a brief to nominators.
“There was no brief, it was just what was the best”, Sir Alistair stressed. However, he went on,
“I think people feel they can’t just be making work in isolation, they have to have some connection. I mean, many people want to say something about the world and the experience of communities around them.
“Lia Rodrigues has always been working in that way.”

Rose Prize: Lia Rodrigues, Encantado. Image: Sammi Landweer
He points out that other featured works, such as Christos Papadopoulos’s Larsen C, though based on an idea, tend more towards abstract movement.
The composition of the jury is interesting, too, as only two of its members, the chairman, Professor Christopher Bannerman, and Arlene Phillips are choreographers; the others are musician P J Harvey, theatre producer Karthika Nair and fashion designer and artist Dr Samuel Ross. What does this tell us about the criteria by which the works will be judged?
“We obviously wanted some dance experts on the panel, but we also wanted people who show an interest in dance, but also bring a different kind of viewpoint.
“The decision has got to be informed by their experience, I think, not just purely from a dance perspective. So, people from fashion and music see things in a different way and move in different ways – we want to bring that into the decision-making process.”
Sadler’s Wells itself will have no say in the final decision, being, in Sir Alistair’s words, “very keen to keep impartiality.”
The cash prize will immediately offer a welcome cushion to the winners, and is very likely to provide a significant boost to their future careers:
“It’s obviously an important thing to get a prize from Sadler’s Wells. There are lots of international promoters coming to see the work, so, again, it’s a platform.
“Some of the people in the main Rose Prize, they’re already established, but It’ll still help them, it’s not always easy. But the Bloom will really present some of these artists for the first time.”
© Teresa Guerreiro
( Banner image credit: Stav Struz Boutros, Sepia. Image: Zohar Ron)
The Rose Prize is at Sadler’s Wells 29 Jan to 8 Feb 2025. More infor, trailers and tickets here