The Royal Ballet's The Dante Project, with music by Thomas Adès, choreography by Wayne McGregor and designs by Tacita Dean, has won the Dance category in this year’s South Bank Sky Arts Awards. The Awards, hosted by Melvyn Bragg, celebrate a broad range of artistic genres including dance, theatre, music, TV and film. The award for The Dante Project was announced at a ceremony at London’s Savoy Hotel on Sunday 10 June.
The Dante Project also won the Outstanding Creative Contribution prize in the Critics’ Circle 22nd National Dance Awards in June this year.
The Dante Project premiered at the Royal Ballet in October 2021, and opened to rave reviews, conducted by the composer himself. The score has been received enthusiastically as a concert piece, conducted to acclaim recently by Gustavo Dudamel in Los Angeles. Adès and Dudamel both conduct the full ballet in a run of performances at Paris’ Palais Garnier in May 2023.
The Times wrote of the The Dante Project,
It’s a sweeping work of fantastic orchestral colours and intense contemporary drama, yet harking back to a romantic age and not afraid to be playful and melodic when called for. In Inferno he even channels Liszt…while for Purgatorio he draws on songs from the liturgical material of the Adès Synagogue in Jerusalem and in Paradiso his music adopts an almost geometric purity as it ascends into a celestial, spiritual joy.
The South Bank Sky Arts Awards will be broadcast on Sky Arts on 13 July at 10pm, and also on streaming service Now.