The Hague – May 11, 2024 – In a sparkling celebration of talent and creativity, Sheree Lenting was awarded the BNG Bank Dance Prize 2024 at the Korzo Theatre. Lenting, originally a visionary dancer, dance programmer, artivist, and choreographer, has convinced the jury with her groundbreaking work and is now recognised as one of the most remarkable and emerging choreographers of her generation.

The BNG Bank Dance Prize, worth €50,000, is awarded annually to a promising choreographer who stands out for innovation, originality, and artistic excellence. Sheree Lenting, with her bold style and profound artistic vision, has brilliantly fulfilled these criteria.

Her pieces have been praised for their ability to evoke emotions, explore social themes, and break down traditional boundaries of dance. With a mix of different dance styles, Lenting manages to create a unique and captivating experience for her audience.

The BNG Bank Dance Prize is a recognition of Lenting's ongoing dedication to the world of dance. Her artistic contributions are seen as groundbreaking and inspiring for the future of the Dutch dance scene.

With this award, Sheree Lenting has secured her place as a pioneer in the contemporary dance world, and we look forward to the further development of her career.

Read the Jury Report for the BNG Bank Dance Prize 2024 below.

The jury of the BNG Bank Dance Prize is pleased to note that despite challenging times for independent choreographers, they were still able to make a selection from a strong pool of promising dance makers. Most of them have been able to showcase their results on a stage thanks to important presentation formats such as Here We Live And Now, Moving Futures Festival, 4x4, Making Space Week, Danslokaal, and many other collections of performances or elaborate (studio) presentations.

Organisations like Korzo, Dansateliers, and DansBrabant, as well as companies and festivals including CaDance, schrit_tmacher, and the Dutch Dance Days, are working together to give new voices the opportunity to further develop their ideas. However, the opportunities for emerging choreographers to share their work in a theatre with a large audience are and will remain limited, which makes it difficult to connect with programmers and the public. Fortunately, there are tour formats like DansClick that are trying to address this gap. The collaboration between the BNG Cultuurfonds and Korzo, which annually results in a national tour for the winner, is therefore invaluable.

The jury has once again dedicated themselves with great energy to selecting the winner of the BNG Bank Dance Prize 2024, which will be performed in ten theatres this fall during the DansClick 26 tour. The jury noticed that many creators naturally combine different dance styles. Choreographers also conduct thorough research into the origins of dance styles, whether or not in light of their own background. However, the jury still misses a breakthrough by a larger number of female creators. In contrast, she does see many double talents, creators who master multiple artistic disciplines: for example, they combine the profession of choreographer with that of composer, musician, programmer, or documentary filmmaker.

The winner of the BNG Bank Dance Prize 2024 is such a double talent. This born and bred Rotterdammer is a hip-hop dancer through and through. But she is more, much more. She is inquisitive, academically trained, she teaches, organises, curates, and programs. She makes films, documentaries, performances, and interactive public programs. Her first short film, She, made with Kiraly Saint Claire and filmed intimately close to the lives of Black women, was immediately presented at the renowned International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Whatever this maker does, she does it with full conviction.

This year's winner is a maker with a mission:

The BNG Bank Dance Prize 2024 goes to choreographer and curator/programmer Sheree Lenting for her duet I am my ancestors wildest dream, created as part of the performance Power in collaboration with Lloyds Company and dancers Cicely Wijnaldum and Ciara Hiwat.

The jury would like to emphasise the choice of this winner with the following jury report: A telling braid of present, past, and future

Sheree Lenting's work is about female and Black empowerment. She brings stories and histories to light that are (too) often still overlooked. She wants to give her audience, her team, and herself a more comprehensive, richer perspective on our history, traditions, and future. In her work, she effortlessly connects this future with the present and the past.

As a choreographer, she not only composes dance material to tell her story, but also creates video images and a soundscape with spoken word. This allows her audience to access the work in multiple ways. The care and attention that speak from her work characterise her as a creator; she takes her audience seriously and seeks keys to give her viewers access to the sources she taps into.

In her choreographic work, she draws from her personal life and the hidden sources within it. She dares to use her own Dutch-Surinamese voice and weaves other voices through it. In her duet "I am my ancestors' wildest dream," Sheree explores the connection through the female line in her family through her own biography. She is searching for voices from the past that don't come to us directly, but on the waves of the wind. She is investigating how those biographical stories of her female ancestors are part of the here and now. She weaves painful memories together with a gentle gaze into an infectious rebellion. Thus, then and now come together in a performance that never becomes too private.

She generously shares this personal perspective in powerful, poetic images: in slumbering song, vital dance, magical video footage, powerful music, and incantatory spoken word. Her audience feels invited to join in, to empathise, to move along with her in multiple ways.

In "I Am My Ancestors' Wildest Dream," all those disciplines swirl around each other poetically, like a vibrant braid of present, past, and future.

The young, energetic performers, Cicely Wijnaldum and Ciara Hiwat, are constantly searching for synchronicity, navigating a field of tension to reach it, sometimes literally through a gauze curtain that waves between them, sometimes figuratively when they combine distance and closeness by bringing their heads together. Thanks in part to the poetic voice of Burnice Hiwat on tape and the electrifying music of HAYP Music, you experience this duet like a dream, which pulls you into an amalgamation of current memories.

It reflects on how we are connected to family lines and that our identity is richer than just the individual in the here and now.

The jury sees in Sheree Lenting a curious, critical creator who carefully searches for a beautiful, poetic, and rich (dance) language to share big and small stories. And even though they might seem difficult and complicated, she makes them accessible. The jury is curious about the potential stories that are still waiting within this creator to be shared with an audience. The jury hopes that the BNG Bank Dance Prize 2024 can give her the well-deserved boost to her career.