Monaco Dance Forum Prizes
From its very first edition, six years ago, the Monaco Dance Forum took on board the then 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. HRH 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”. The UNESCO prizewinner to emerge out of 50 contending 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 handful of French words she had acquired in Monaco, notably merci bien. 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 in the next month. The Brazilian was also the recipient of a second in the five digital prizes awarded at the Forum: a month’s residence at the Centre Choreographique National d’Aix.