On March 9, Eri Karatsu, artistic director of DaBY, attended the presentation ceremony for the 73rd Art Encouragement Prize for 2022.

This year’s award recognizes the national tour of the “Aichi Arts Center x Dance Base Yokohama Performing Arts Selection 2022″ and the diversity of dance demonstrated by it. Performing Arts Selection 2022” is a touring performance of dance works created at the Corona Disaster from October to December 2021 in collaboration with Dance Base Yokohama and Aichi Arts Center in public theaters nationwide.
For this tour, we worked to bring selected dance works created by Japan’s leading choreographers to as many people as possible in each region, and to further enhance the quality of the stage works by re-staging them. Starting in September 2022 at the Kochi Prefectural Art Museum (Kochi), it has been performed at the Matsumoto Civic Art Center (Nagano), the Iwaki Arts Center Alios (Fukushima), the Ryutopia Niigata Civic Art Center (Niigata), the Kichijoji Theater (Tokyo), the Kumamoto Prefectural Theater (Kumamoto), and the Yamaguchi Information Arts Center (Yamaguchi), with 1,716 The production was seen by 1,716 audiences nationwide.

Click here to see the award of the Minister’s Prize for the Promotion of the Arts.
Click here for coverage on the Ballet Channel.

Reason for Award
Eri Karatsu has been active as a producer in public theaters, and in 2020, she participated in the launch of “Dance Base Yokohama,” a new dance house supported by the private sector. As a result of these collaborations, he organized the “Aichi Arts Theatre x Dance Base Yokohama Performing Arts Selection 2022” national tour in 2022, which was highly acclaimed for demonstrating the diversity of dance. He started his activities to create a safe and secure production environment to support artists’ independent activities and draw out their potential. From the perspective of a creative audience, he has also focused on creating new audiences with a critical eye for the performing arts. These activities have also provided an opportunity to reexamine the meaning and methods of arts promotion. The company has been a driving force behind important initiatives that affect both the creation of the arts, which are not limited to dance, and the way in which promotion and support measures are implemented.

Selection Process
In the Art Promotion Division, there were 15 nominations for the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award and 12 nominations for the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award for Newcomers. The first selection committee narrowed down the nominees to four for the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award and five for the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award for Newcomers, and the second selection committee discussed the nominations. The Guidelines for the Art Promotion Division stipulate that the candidates must be active in a new field or in multiple fields, making it difficult to compare the candidates on the same footing, even if they were narrowed down to two or so. Under these conditions, the selection jury shared the idea of choosing those who were not players or performers, in other words, those who would be difficult to evaluate in other categories. In the end, the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award went to Eri Karatsu, a performing arts producer. The reason for this award was the results of the “Aichi Arts Center x Dance Base Yokohama Performing Arts Selection 2022,” but the activities of “Dance Base Yokohama,” which were the basis for the selection, were also highly evaluated. (Excerpt)

 

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