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The nominations are:
Michael Corder, Cathy Marston, David Nixon.
More information about each choreographer is given below:
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Michael Corder
(English National Ballet)
Michael Corder's career as dancer and choreographer began with the Royal Ballet - L'Invitation au voyage is particularly remembered - but he has worked with several companies abroad and at home, most recently with English National Ballet. His Cinderella for the company (now being revived) was awarded two important prizes, and his Melody on the Move, for which he has now been nominated - an instant success in ENB's summer season at Sadler's Wells - is being performed during the forthcoming tour. It is a piece that, with its music by composers who were popular, and frequent radio fare in the 1930s and 1940s, evinces nostalgia for a time when Corder had not yet been born. He nevertheless captured the mood and the moment to perfection.
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Cathy Marston
(English National Ballet and ROH2)
Cathy Marston was trained as a dancer at the Royal Ballet Upper School, but as a choreographer she has found her own inimitable dance language. In her recent works she has chosen very demanding subjects: the relationship between T. S. Eliot and his troubled first wife in Facing Viv for English National Ballet and the Sophie's Choice made with Royal Ballet dancers for the Linbury Studio Theatre. It is for this complex work, based on William Styron's novel of the same name, that she has been nominated for the award. Marston's work is always ambitious and thought-provoking.
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David Nixon
(Northern Ballet Theatre)
Canadian David Nixon has proved a wise choice as the artistic director since 2001 of Northern Ballet Theatre, a company that was seeking a director-choreographer capable of providing full-evening narrative ballets with popular appeal. If his first big success - with critics as well as general audiences - was the charming and sensitive Madame Butterfly, he has also scored with the Wuthering Heights ballet for which he has now been nominated for an award, and which has been toured round the country. His later A Midsummer Night's Dream, premièred in Leeds in September, was toured in October and is due at Sadler's Wells in March.
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Picture credits
Christopher Hampson © Bill Cooper,
Michael Corder © Patrick Baldwin,
Cathy Marston © Peter Teigan,
David Nixon © Brian Slater.
All text is © copyright of the Critics' Circle / National Dance Awards. |
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