© The Place Place Prize reviews Place Prixce 2006 Preview Short Listed Commissions Place website: http://www.theplace.org.uk Broom in reviews Elmore in reviews Nina Rajarani reviews Tom Dale reviews Tanja Raman reviews Cathy Marston reviews Rachel Lopez de la Nieta and Ben Ash reviews more Graham Watts reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

The preliminaries ended on a suitable cliff-hanger followed by a delicious slice of judging controversy when the finalists were eventually announced in The Place bar almost exactly on the stroke of midnight.

Earlier in the evening, the final semi-final had erupted into life with Nina Rajarani's 'QUICK!', a multi-media melange of bharatanatyam, ballet, films, live music and vocals. It was the first and only piece from the 20 semi-finalists to have the audience cheering and applauding during its performance. At some mid-way point a screen was upturned to create a table and the eight dancers, musicians and vocalist had a musical, dancing committee meeting. It was great fun and the energy of the work quickly transferred to the audience. It may have been a bit too busy at times, especially when the two screens were in use simultaneously, but the quality and vibrancy of the performance got the evening off to a rousing start and contrasted starkly with the lagubrious performances to come.

The dancers in Rajarani's work all wore shirts, ties, tailored tousers and belts, just as if they had popped out of the office to perform and this formal theme carried over into the beginning of Tom Dale's work, with the choreographer performing his own opening solo in a grey suit. He was quickly joined by three women (only two of whom were credited in the programme - late change?) all looking as if they were flashbacks to the Pan's People generation with their knee-high white socks and sleeveless, halterneck dresses. Dale's choreography certainly used the Place space effectively and there was no quarrel with some excellent performances, especially from Tam Ward (who also appeared in an earlier semi-final dancing Jonathan Lunn's 'Self Assembly') but it was difficult to shake off the thought that it had all been done before.

The third work was perhaps the most innovative of all in terms of its movement: a solo danced by British-trained, Finnish performer, Tanja Raman, to on-stage vocals by Philippa Reeves that were then mixed (again live on-stage) to provide a repetitive electronic echo, mimicking Reeves' haunting voice, hence the name of the work (Kaiku -Finnish for echo). Raman has a distinctive movement style: she hardly moved from the central space that she occupied throughout the work and there was little footwork at all, other than to change the angle and length of her stance, often flowing into long lunges; her upper body twisted fluidly into a series of poses - looking sometimes like the pictures of greek athletes in the ancient olympics, pulling a giant bow or throwing a javelin. A very slow and contemplative start burst into a loud, reverberating manic flurry of expressionism before subsiding again to a finish, which seemed to come sooner than fifteen minutes after it had begun. I think that Raman deserves credit for bringing some peculiarity and freshness to the competition.

At the beginning of the evening, the laconic compere (Jack Merivale) told us that there would be an extra interval after Cathy Marston's work, as well as one before it, so that "we could get over her piece"! In the event, I found myself slightly disappointed by Cathy's work ('d)us(t') not that it wasn't eminently watchable as a typically passionate and emotional Marston duet, danced to the max by Dylan Elmore and Charlotte Broom, but in some ways it seemed as if something was missing, that it was an extract of a work lifted out and placed into The Place prize. Half-way through the piece, I realised that this was the nineteenth of the entries and I had just witnessed the first partnered lift in the competition! Marston has a tremendous gift to speak to an audience through the interaction of two bodies and there were inventive and fascinating movements in her pas de deux. Unsurprisingly, in a work requiring such emotional and physical energy over fifteen minutes, there were also contemplative lulls but towards the end, these became more obvious and I suspect that this will have worked against Cathy in the popular vote (especially set against the non-stop energy of Rajarani's piece). She may have not been successful here but there are fascinating ideas in this work that I hope will resurface again as part of a longer, narrative piece.

I have very little to say about the final work of the competition because it really did nothing for me at all. The set was laid out as a nightclub with barstools and an on-stage musician studded around a wooden dance floor. The bar theme was enhanced by a series of wine glasses which turned out to be musical props. There was a long solo that focused on shadowplay with the dancer's silhouette on a metal backdrop but most of the movement was uninspirational and bland.

The cliffhanger came with the final audience vote of the semi-finals. By the time the last work ended, it was already close to 11.30 pm and there were almost a hundred people less left to vote than on previous evenings. However, since the scores are an average of all votes rather than a total, it ought to have made no difference. In the event, the overall scores were lower than on any previous evening with Nina Rajarani and Cathy Marston sharing the top spot at 3.12 stars each and Tom Dale finishing just two hundredths of a rating behind in third place.

The final votes were:
Nina Rajarani - 'QUICK!' - 3.12 stars
Tom Dale - 'Whose Futures' - 3.10 stars
Tanja Raman - 'Kaiku' - 2.53 stars
Cathy Marston - 'd)us(t' - 3.12 stars
Rachel Lopez de la Nieta and Ben Ash - 'In This World' - 2.83 stars

All of this meant that the winner of the third semi-final - Luca Silvestrini's 'B for Body'- had won the audience vote and was in the Final. But who will the judges choose to join them?