The Place Prize awards were meant to do for modern dance what the Turner Prize does for modern art – namely, get an entire nation talking about it, for better or for worse. With a top prize of £100,000, “the idea of this biennial jamboree is to find, by means of an open entry, outsider judges and audience votes, neglected talent that the over-prescriptive Arts Council system misses. So how did the inaugural final manage to be so inferior to the best (or even the average) being produced in British modern dance nowadays?”