National Dance awards nominations give young artists a…

National Dance awards nominations give young artists a chance to shine

Akram Khan and Tamara Rojo in Dust — Double nominee … Akram Khan, pictured with Tamara Rojo in Dust. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

The nominations for the 15th National Dance awards have just been announced – whittled down from a long list of nearly 400 names, and from a year’s worth of performances that took place between 1 September 2013 and 31 August 2014.

A new category, the emerging artist award, was added this year to ensure younger and less established dancers and choreographers made the final cut. Ever since the awards were established, there has been a debate among voting critics about how to keep the number of categories within manageable and affordable limits while still representing as wide a spectrum of talent as possible.

In this round of awards, it is noticeable how fluid the boundaries of each category can be. Arthur Pita, for instance, has been nominated in both contemporary and classical choreographer categories, while Akram Khan’s two nominations as dancer and choreographer of Dust both appear in the contemporary categories, even though the work itself was commissioned and performed by English National Ballet.

That blurring of the contemporary/classical divide is a measure of how fluid the dance scene has become, just as the nomination of 22-year-old Francesca Hayward as both emerging and outstanding dancer is a measure of her fast-blooming talent.

Given that 50 dance writers from across the UK have nominated up to five names per category, it is inevitable that each of us will have issues with the list. I may be breaking Critics’ Circle protocol by wishing publicly that Hetain Patel and Akane Takada had appeared among the outstanding dancer nominations; that Mark Morris’s maverick little masterpiece, A Wooden Tree, had appeared in the contemporary choreography list; and that somewhere in all these nominations would be a reflection of the fact that, for me, the Mariinsky’s performance of Alexei Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH was one of the great dance events of the year.

Even so, when the winners of each category are announced on 26 January 2015, it promises to be a vintage list.