Sadler’s Wells launches ambitious Rose International Dance Prize

“So, this person rang me and said: ‘Have you ever thought of doing a dance prize? I’d support that.’” Sir Alistair Spalding, director of Sadler’s Wells, replied to the caller: “Well, yes, actually I’ve done quite a lot of thinking about it.”

Talking in his office in Sadler’s Wells theatre in London, Spalding (who was knighted this year for services to dance) says: “I’d had the idea of this years and years ago, when we realised there just wasn’t a big prize with a substantial international profile for dance. But, what with everything else, including the creation of our new theatre in east London, it always went down the list.”

The call from “this person” — an anonymous donor whose identity is closely guarded — prompted Spalding and his team back into thinking about such an award. And now the Sadler’s Wells Rose International Dance Prize is launched, offering an award to a new work at least 50 minutes long from a company anywhere in the world, plus a smaller prize for younger companies not more than five years old.

Are there, I ask, other such prizes in the dance world? There are very few, Spalding tells me, and certainly nothing on the scale this one envisages.

“This will be something very good for the profile of dance,” he says, “here and also internationally. And Sadler’s Wells is well placed to do it — to present an international survey of the work and also to stimulate a bit of debate around the art form.”

He is typically modest in the way he presents things but goes on to outline a startling international reach. “With a system of nominators around seven regions of the word, the final shortlist of companies will perform live, in London, over the course of a few weeks — so that people can come and see the work and make their own minds up about it, like you can with the Turner Prize.”

The award will be every two years, with the first finale in 2025. “It seems a long way off, but we need time to make the selection,” he says, “and then we have to allow the companies to plan their visit to London — it’s a condition of the prize that they can bring their work here. After that, it’ll run every two years.”

In effect, this will be an unprecedented international dance extravaganza across London, with the larger shortlisted companies performing in the main space at Sadler’s Wells (which seats 1,500), or in the Peacock Theatre (capacity 1,000), or the small Lilian Baylis Studio (180). And, in the soon-to-be-opened Sadler’s Wells East, situated in the former Olympic Park in Stratford and launching next year with six studios, a choreographic school, a hip-hop academy and many other community engagement initiatives, the “Welcome” prize for younger companies will be given a showing.

Works will come in through a network of nominators, Spalding says, who are “our colleagues”, professionals in touch with the local scene across the continents. “But,” says Spalding, “for the different panels we don’t just want dance people, we want a whole range of people looking at this from different perspectives. The chair won’t be me, it’ll be independent.”

We want the Sadler’s Wells stamp of quality, and of thinking

That’s a question I had been eager to ask, given that so many leading international dancemakers — Akram Khan, Crystal Pite, Matthew Bourne, Sylvie Guillem, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Nitin Sawhney, Russell Maliphant, Sharon Eyal and more, in fact the roll-call of A-list contemporary creatives in the field — are associate artists of Sadler’s Wells, already part of the family.

Won’t there be, I asked, a risk of insider trading? Although it is organised under his umbrella, Spalding replies, “no one here is involved with any decisions about selections. We want the Sadler’s Wells stamp of quality, and of thinking, but we need to have a separation from the final decisions.”

Dance is, though, such a small world, and he surely knows all of it. There’s not much chance of a wild card. “Occasionally something just pops up that we had no idea about,” he replies, “and something miraculous happens. A while ago we had a digital global dance competition — we invited people from all over the world to send in 10-minute clips — some very surprising things came up, things we’d never seen before.”

Although the identity of the donor is tightly guarded, I can’t help but ask about what must be a really enormous budget. Bringing seven or eight whole dance companies to London, with expenses and salaries, plus the administration costs . . . but Spalding is charmingly tight-lipped; there’s no prising any numbers out of him. All he will say is that this bonanza funding is secure for the foreseeable future, and that they are looking for a digital partner so the whole prize has a digital aspect and can reach a greater audience.

I’m interested in the primary aim of the new Rose International Dance Prize. When I suggest that it might be nurturing young talent, Spalding demurs. Their upcoming projects at the new space in Stratford, he says, are all about that. But now, “what I’ve been trying to do in the 15 to 16 years I’ve been here is to push this art form into the centre of the debate — to make it deeply part of the culture, part of your cultural journey in London.

“There are these fantastic, wonderful things from across the world that speak to us, in this particular way that dance does. So the most important thing of all is the advocacy of the art form.”

So, I venture, this prize is about celebrating excellence? He has a brief moment of recoil (that’s almost a dirty word in the arts, as it might suggest an unacceptable elitism). “Excellence of thought,” he replies after a quick pause, “as well as excellence of performance. Fantastic production values, yes, and of course dancing, but also concepts — in other words, really intelligent work.”

He is looking, he says, for dance that investigates “things going on across the world. In east Asia, in Africa — that’s why it has to be on a global scale. A diversity of work, in every sense of that word.”

Meanwhile, the challenge of running Sadler’s Wells’ existing programmes keeps on keeping on, with ever more ambitious output. With only 9 per cent public funding, and an audience that needs to be coaxed back post-Covid (though his “hardcore tribe” of dance audience is very loyal, he says), there is in fact no other comparable producing house in the world.

Not only Sadler’s Wells’ output but its international profile is underrated — there are, for instance, at least three touring productions at the moment, in three continents, and Spalding throws back his head and laughs about the issues involved in sending 38 dancers from 14 African countries around the world during Covid restrictions, for Pina Bausch’s all-African The Rite of Spring. The new Rose International Dance Prize will raise Sadler’s Wells’ profile, Spalding agrees — but, above all, it is about the sheer love of dance.

Alistair Spalding and Akram Khan will be speaking at the FT Weekend Festival on Saturday, September 3; ukftweekendfestival.live.ft.com

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