[dance-tech] Re: MDF - Look-Back, Part 2:

The Future of Dance is Digital


Monaco Dance Forum Prizes
From its very first edition, six year ago, the Monaco Dance Forum took on board 
the emerging use of digital technology in choreography. Today, the biennial 
Forum is recognized as the most important event world-wide in digital dance. 
Indeed, the creativity showcased at the Forum persuaded the UN?s UNESCO to 
devote its 10,000 Euro Digital Arts Prize to dance for the first time this year.

HRM Princess Caroline, who chaired the UNESCO jury of five international dance 
professionals, described the competing entries from professional and student 
choreographers as ?recounting our lives and revealing our sentiments?visiting 
our memories and plunging us into the future? proposing experiences that 
immerse us in a living universe.

UNESCO winner

The UNESCO prize-winner to emerge out of 50 contenting projects from 22 
countries was the young Brazilian Ivani Santana, creator of Man Made His 
Difference.  As the title suggests, the ballet explores the aspects of man?s 
differences and similarities of race, gender, culture and economies. 
?Differences? are clearly a theorem close to the Brazilian choreographer?s 
heart. Arriving on stage to accept her award, she did not limit herself to 
expressing her gratitude in the French she acquired in Monaco,; she called upon 
the help of a translator to impress upon the audience that although her country 
had problems of poverty, it had no less creative potential. Ivani Santana?s 
French vocabulary is bound to expand next month. The Brazilian was also the 
recipient of a second in the five digital prizes awarded at the Forum: a 
month?s residency at the Centre Choreographique National d?Aix.

SACD winner

The US/French team Hillary Goidell and Richard Siegal took the 5,000 Euro prize 
awarded by SACD (Sociétés des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques) for their 
If/Then Open Source, a work in which the audience is the counterpart in an 
encounter between a sleeping person a  strange visitor.

Sogeda (Société de Gestion des Drouts d?Auteurs de Monaco) made two awards of 
5,000 Euro each to Rijjamalala Rakotuarimamama of Madagascar and Brisa Munoz 
Parra of Chile. Rakotuarimamama?s award came for his Dimgadingama, the name of 
a tropical plant, that multiplies according to its environment, which the 
choreographer used as a symbol for the evolution and metamorphosis of the 
individual, while it was the Ejecicios Electrocoreograficos of the Chilean 
choreographer that captured the jury?s attention. Brisa Munoz Parra?s work 
evolved out of the relationship between the movement of the body and electronic 
imagery.

Scholarship

The final award was a scholarship offered by an American institution at the 
cutting edge of digital dance, the University of Arizona, home of choreographer 
Trisha Brown and dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones.  It went to Chi-min Hsieh 
for his Fuente, a study of the inner propagation of energy outward to material 
bone and muscle. The bursary, which offers a nine-month residence at the US 
university, is estimated to be worth over 20.000 dollars.

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(cited from December Monaco Times response to Awards Ceremony at MDF 2006)

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