Birkbeck tutor wins The Place Prize
Riccardo Buscarini, lecturer on our Foundation Degree Dance programme has won The Place Prize for dance.
Riccardo Buscarini, lecturer on our Foundation Degree Dance programme has won The Place Prize for dance.
The Place Prize, Europe's biggest choreography award, has been described as the "dance world equivalent to the Turner and Man Booker prizes" (The Observer).
Talking about the making of his work Athletes Buscarini said: 'I wanted to create a dark piece using brightness, to build an engine using bodies, to show hate using love. Things constantly transform into their opposite.'
Eddie Nixon, Director of Theatre and Artist Development at The Place and chair of the judging panel said:
'This year’s Place Prize finalists are perhaps the most provocative, exciting line up we’ve ever had. They make demands and they give rewards. They are unapologetically contemporary. Any of them would be a worthy winner, but I’m delighted with the judges’ choice. Riccardo is a brilliantly creative artist, and Athletes is a perfectly realised piece. I can’t wait to see what he does next.'
Birkbeck Choreography and Performance lecturers Eva Recacha and Riccardo Buscarini were both commissioned to create new works to enter the competition last September and for the second time in a row they were finalists.
About Riccardo's work: Athletes is a reflection on competition, viewed as a tension between man and machine, set in a bleak world where cold mechanisms shift from cooperation to conflict, from solidarity to cruelty. www.riccardobuscarini.com
Eva's work: The Wishing Well is a space inhabited with dreams. For the person who enters it, it can be full of possibilities or full of rejection. In it, one can devise a thousand strategies to be heard, but in the end, one can only hope. www.evarecacha.com