Each year we invite established professionals, subject experts and artists and creatives from across the UK to form part of the independent Jury that will select the Shortlisted Artists and Fellows of the Arts Foundation Futures Awards.
We are thrilled to share that the Jury members for the Arts Foundation Futures Awards 2023 for Dance Theatre are:
Cassa Pancho MBE
Of Trinidadian and British parents, Cassa founded Ballet Black to provide role models to young, aspiring black and Asian dancers. A year later, she opened the BB Junior School in Shepherd’s Bush. Cassa is also a graduate of the 2009 National Theatre cultural leadership programme, Step Change. Ballet Black won both the Critics’ Circle National Dance Award for Outstanding Company in 2009, Best Independent Company in 2012 and Best Mid-Scale Company in 2022. Cassa was awarded an MBE in the 2013 New Year Honours’ List for Services to Classical Ballet. In 2018, Cassa was awarded the Freedom of the City of London. To date, she has commissioned 48 choreographers, to create over 60 new ballets for the Company.
Florence Peake
Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making solo and group performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice since 1995. Presenting work internationally and across the UK in galleries, theatres and the public realm, Peake is known for an approach which is at once sensual and witty, expressive and rigorous, political and intimate.
Toni Racklin
Toni Racklin began her theatre career working at the celebrated Roundhouse Theatre, before working with Unicorn Theatre for Children, Lyric Hammersmith, Liverpool Playhouse and West End producers Andrew Treagus Associates, The Peter Hall Company and the Women’s Playhouse Trust. Toni joined the Barbican Centre in 1996. Several of her projects have subsequently been nominated and won coveted Olivier, Critics Circle, Evening Standard, Time Out and the late Peter Brook’s Empty Space Awards.
Entering its 30th year, the prestigious Arts Foundation Futures Awards support the UK’s most promising artists and creatives at a breakthrough moment in their careers with £10,000 unconditional Fellowships.
The Shortlisted Artists for the Dance Theatre award be announced in January 2023. The winning Fellow receiving £10,000 will be unveiled at a live Award Ceremony in February 2023, with all shortlisted artists receiving £1,000.
The Dance Theatre award is supported in partnership with the Maria Björnson Memorial Fund.
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Image credits: Courtesy of Cassa Pancho; Florence Peake by Christa Holka, 2021; Toni Racklin