Rose Prize finalists, clockwise from top left. Christos Papadopoulos, Larsen C © Pinelopi Gerasimou for Onassis Stegi. Kyle Abraham, An Untitled Love © Christopher Duggan. Marco da Silva Ferreira, CARCAÇA © José Caldeira. Lia Rodrigues, Encantado © Sammi Landweer

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Rose and Bloom international dance prizes

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Rose Prize finalists, clockwise from top left. Christos Papadopoulos, Larsen C © Pinelopi Gerasimou for Onassis Stegi. Kyle Abraham, An Untitled Love © Christopher Duggan. Marco da Silva Ferreira, CARCAÇA © José Caldeira. Lia Rodrigues, Encantado © Sammi Landweer

Georgia Howlett • Sanjoy Roy

20 March 2025

What are the new Rose and Bloom prizes? What was the selection, and who won the election?

Seven choreographers from across the globe were shortlisted for the new, biennial Rose International Dance Prize. Funded by an anonymous donor (who has already committed to ten editions), the prize is split across two categories: Rose (£40,000) for established choreographers, and Bloom (£15,000) for emerging talent with no more than ten years of experience. Labelled as a prize for ‘the most inventive and daring’ choreographers at work today, it is open to any style – and doubtless causes many conundrums for its network of nominators and its final judging panel. Choreography aside, the prize achieves impressive global representation: this first edition stages works hailing from the USA, Portugal, Greece, Brazil, Georgia, France and Taiwan. —GH

Rose Prize

Kyle Abraham: An Untitled Love – USA

An Untitled Love is a pleasure for both us and the company of performers, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham. The music of American neo-soul artist D’Angelo plays a leading role beside the dancers; his nonchalance and sensuality manifests in breezy balletic jazz that oozes controlled pirouettes, gliding shunts and nifty pas de bourrées.

Blending styles like honey… Kyle Abraham’s An Untitled Love

Several love stories, not all explicitly romantic, unfold between five couples, and one pair takes centre stage in a coy game of hard-to-get. That said, the piece is a lyrical ode to Black communities, with a myriad of trios and group sequences smoothly interlaced. Movement is conversational, not performative, and takes its sweet time, pausing often for playful interaction and monologues on what on earth to wear to a date. Jazz becomes voguing becomes streetdance; Abraham blends styles like honey, but ease and satisfaction dictate the steps more than any particular genre.

Sadler’s main stage is a mighty space to fill, and An Untitled Love features only a sofa, a plant and a red backdrop etched with drawings and mutterings. It doesn’t matter though, for this cast are truly radiant. —GH

Marco da Silva Ferreira: CARCAÇA – Portugal

Live drums are an overwhelming opener to Marco da Silva Ferreira’s CARCAÇA; in fact, much of the soundtrack in this piece is felt as a deep thrum in the chest, a rumble beneath the feet. The cast enter progressively from the audience to become a chanting pack, by no means limbering up before going in for the choreographic kill. In garish confidence they stamp their feet and stir their hips, before mounting the stage and prowling its perimeters. The excitement of some only highlights the detached gazes of others; an uprising is on its way, and this feels very much like the rehearsal.

An uprising is on its way. Marco da Silva Ferreira’s CARCAÇA

Developments of a simple step, a side-to-side jump, becomes gruelling cardio in geometric arrangements. Synths swell like the moment before a jumpscare in a horror film, but when sound ceases, leaving only the scuffs and squeaks of trainers and ragged breathing, it is clear that scorching soundtracks are not always necessary in creating tension.

The floor rolls up into a screen for the projection of a song. The Portuguese lyrics condemn fascism, celebrate working-class, hard-working women, and is sung twice through with t-shirts inverted over their heads. Impassioned as the performers are, it feels challenging to reconcile the emotional stakes of this carnival ending with the abstraction that preceded it. —GH

Christos Papadopoulos: Larsen C – Greece

Named after a 2017 breakaway Antarctic ice sheet, Larsen C is a work of minuscule shifts and mighty repercussions. The stage is spliced horizontally, a mirror positioned upstage at a downward angle. White noise is oddly comforting, like the sound one would hear from the bottom of a cave. A solo dancer wriggles and drifts in this purgatory, a blank canvas awaiting impression.

Influenced by distant sounds, and each other… Larsen C by Christos Papadopoulos

When others join, they provoke small waves. Every minute movement triggers another, unleashes ripples on neighbouring bodies; not distinctive, but constant. Arms are jellyfish tentacles, legs move only to advance them in teeny, contained steps. Wearing slippery slate grey, these figures are victims to the influence of distant sounds, and each other.

Sophisticated lighting casts sultry shadows over ever-shifting bodies. Together as a group they evade exact unison, but they are made up of each other all the same. We catch the moment before a tender embrace before bodies touch and succumb to something greater than mere influence. Shadows fall before we can witness its impact. —GH

Lia Rodrigues: Encantado – Brazil

A slow start and a sudden finish, and in between it’s all about cloth.

Start: a row of naked bodies, in silence and barely visible in the darkness, slowly, slowly unroll a carpet that covers the stage. As the lights slowly, slowly undim, it is revealed as a many-hued, patterned patchwork of cloths that the performers burrow beneath, like sandworms inching their way below technicolour dunes.

Cloth, clothing, bodies and beings. Encantado by Lia Rodrigues

Between: something rather marvellous happens. The cloth starts to become clothing, not carpet, and the bodies become beings – all manner of colourful creature, wrapping and knotting the material in improbable and impractical swathes around their burgeoning fantasies. Catch glimpses of blooms and birds, of kings and maids, shamans and monsters, of turbans and nappies and cummerbunds and cloaks. The sound of song arises, and the movements of dance as well as those of work and play.

Finish: it stops. No finale, no fade, no twist or turn or roundoff. An ending, then, but not a closure.

Should I conclude? Perhaps only to say that this is the kind of work that you either go with, or you don’t. It cleaves so close to its own throughline that you need to too, or the spell breaks. —SR

Bloom

Stav Struz Boutrous: Sepia – Israel

Style and artifice are often considered enemies to truth or sincerity. Sepia – an artful, highly stylised solo by Stav Struz Boutrous – gives the lie to that too common misconception. Lanterns, rugs, a weave of branches are carefully placed about the stage, markers for Boutros’s measured travelogue around a specifically Georgian cultural landscape. Clothed in a glistening, highly decorated bodysuit and sporting braided hair extensions, Boutros has the air of a symbolic being.

Stylised deliberations. Stav Struz Boutrous, Sepia

Her dancing, drawing from Georgian traditions, is simultaneously impressive and contained – careful spirals on the knees, slow sinkings that roll over the arches of the foot, turns and travels punctuated with exact gestures of head or hands. Flight is indicated by tremolo arms, tears by fingertips on the face, the threat of violence by a dagger, ritually unsheathed.

For all its deliberations, it is a surprisingly moving performance, its emotions contained in constructions, not expressions. Sepia doesn’t ‘sell’ itself, and the elastic bond between performance and audience does indeed sometimes stretch thin. But in an era that often fetishises authenticity and packages it as ‘realness’, it’s refreshing to find a considered poetics that is quiet, and strong. —SR

Leïla Ka: Maldonne – France

Five women and 40 dresses make up Leïla Ka’s Maldonne. In the opening scene, gestures of despair are frozen, as in statues or paintings, a hand glued to the face to wipe a tear. The speed picks up and rapid breathing is their music as they oscillate through sequences, the focal point shifting from an anguished face to the stomach. When they change dresses, they too change. Florals are replaced with silky animal print. These women are lustful and vulgar. Fists and bare knees collide with the floor as they drive their hips repeatedly. When the silk of their dresses is not held in their teeth, they spit.

When they change dresses, they too change. Leïla Ka’s Maldonne

It would not be a piece on feminism if there were not a reference to hysteria. When it arrives, it spreads like disease: they feverishly grasp their skirts and attack the floor. Seemingly confused by their own behaviour, this scene feels like a heightened mocking and rejection of delicately composed feminine ideals.

Be it the ‘Je suis malade’ ballad of frightening emotion or a quietly lilting phrase in black skirts, the cast shed layers, and the dresses form the perfect vessel for female multiplicity. If only being accepted for our many identities were as easy as changing your clothes. —GH

Wang Yeu-Kwn: Beings – Taiwan

Like Stav Struz Boutros’s Sepia, Wang Yeu-Kwn’s Beings is a work of poetry, not drama. It is built around the idea of traces – of movement, of moods, above all of the marks we leave on paper in the form of drawing and writing. Its one main device is an outsize sheet of treated rice paper that Wang places centre stage like a crumpled white peony – which as it unfurls, reveals another figure inside, Lee Yin-Ying. The two lean into each other. Nostalgic sounds of American crooning cast a melancholy romanticism, but it doesn’t fix them: the relationship turns more turbulent, though never antagonistic, until Lee slips on Wang’s t-shirt, and Wang, rewrapped in paper, slips mysteriously away.

Marked and creased. Beings by Wang Yeu-Kwn

Where there’s paper, there’s ink, and here it’s used both to make naive drawings – a person, a flower, a dog – and to let the bodies and footsteps leave their messier, material imprint upon the rumpled sheet as it variously evokes clothing, sea, an island, giftwrap – or simply paper, marked and creased.

Just as Chinese script is the physical marks of ideas, not sounds, so this performance feels like traces of meanings that lie elsewhere, beyond our grasp. That can make it eerily insubstantial, almost as if it were conjured out of and dissolved back into nothing – yet it is undeniably beautiful, like a few calligraphed stanzas of free verse. —SR

Results, responses

So who won? The Rose prize went to Larsen C by Christos Papadopoulos, the Bloom to Sepia Stav Struz Boutros. No surprise that this engendered some huffing and puffing, as indeed did the whole competition. Was this really the ‘best’ new dance in the world? Who decides? On what basis? Likeability? Innovation? Vision? Execution? Popularity?

The outcome of any vote – as we all know – is at least in part a result of its selection process and election procedure, and in an international field such as this there’s also the sizeable question of cultural differences, both of material conditions and mentality. The question almost asks itself: if it’s that difficult to define a ‘winner’, why have a competition at all?

One answer is: it’s not about the winner. The competition is a means for the field itself to gain an international profile, and for everyone, not just the winners, to ride the swell of its wave. Furthermore, it builds a network of practice, experience and opinion that did not exist before. A whole system gets set up, with the prize serving as its visible face.

That said, I can’t resist giving my own opinion. For the Bloom, I would have been happy for any of the entrants to win – though I wasn’t expecting it to be Sepia, because it fitted no current trend that I know of (it didn’t go down so well with critics I know of, either). For the Rose, I thought Kyle Abraham’s An Untitled Love would win, not necessarily because it was the ‘best’ but because it was, by some distance, the most likeable, even loveable. The other Rose works aimed for more difficult places, tenaciously pushing at their own boundaries even if the results were flawed. In the event, I was happy Papadopoulos won, since the first third of Larsen C (seen from the stalls, not the circle) was my standout moment.

One final thought: nearly everything could benefit from a good edit, because cutting is a vital part of creating, and gives shape to what remains. If you want a prize rose, prune it. —SR