The Place Prize for Dance/ Cinderella, Royal Ballet

Reports of ballet’s death are greatly exaggerated, but I’m not equally sanguine about the craft of choreography. Having sat dumbstruck through the four limping dogs masquerading as finalists in The Place’s prize “for dance” [sic] on Tuesday, I found myself amazed, simply amazed, all over again at the fecundity and sheer knowledge of Ashton’s Cinderella, having its umpteenth revival last night at the Royal Ballet.

The point is not that these are apples and pears: the point is that it’s visible in premieres at The Place, Sadler’s Wells, and yes ballet too, that the knowledge, the curiosity, the hunger to write and express in dance language is dripping away at a horrendous rate, as if legibility, line, shaping, technical skill and expressive articulation have been found somehow insignificant to pass on. Or possibly just too high a mountain for today’s less and less skilled “choreographers” to climb.

Whereas Ashton, like any supremely gifted writer in any form, can’t stop finding opportunities to stuff a little choreographic sweetmeat into discreet corners of his Act II ball scene, to divert us with an unnecessary little Act III overture parade, or to elucidate a tiny character detail in a regal pas de deux, and he can’t write the smallest phrase of ballet without wanting to turn it into a brilliantly cut necklace of academic vocabulary or to surprise with one of his own slightly weird twists (those fairies and stars offer a shower of oddities: their closed knees when you expect turn-out, their sudden synchronised lurches forward, the absolute exactness with which the season fairies each physically become the essence of their season). (Pictured right, last night's Marianela Nuñez and Thiago Soares © Tristram Kenton/ROH.)

The gap between the one kind of unafraid, inquiring expertise and the second kind of dodge-and-distract is wide, wide, wide. In case I’m seen as some kind of ballet-centric Stuckist, I put into the fearless expertise camp Pina Bausch (the rigour of her choreography which I’ll review imminently on the Wim Wenders Pina 3D film) and somewhere a little closer towards the dodge-and-distract end the decent stepmaking of David Bintley on his new Cinderella for Birmingham Royal Ballet, which is a supporting act to fine dramaturgy and set designs.

But far at that bottom end I’ll lump the depressingly undercrafted quartet currently suing for your votes (and therefore for prize money) at The Place. There is little value at best in competitive prizes for creative arts, and the £35,000 handed out by Bloomberg to The Place this year, I’d argue, would be much more pertinently and helpfully (for the future of dance) awarded to help a more widely seen, medium-scale new creation onto the many empty theatres in Britain. But that wouldn’t get so much publicity as shouting that this is Europe’s largest choreography competition, which is what you get when you open it to anyone (and their dog) to apply.

That 170 people originally applied for the chance to make a 12-20-minute piece this year shows either a huge well of choreographic talent boiling to be untapped (I wish), or, quite likely, a fairly desperate come-and-chance-it attitude given that it would have been much tougher to get a break with the Arts Council. The Bloomberg judges aren’t that focused on pure dance (the final panel have been chosen from visual arts, opera, theatre and performance poetry) so the shortlist this year, unsurprisingly, hasn’t a smidge of that precious seminal material, curiosity about dancing movement, on view.

Each night until Saturday week’s finale, the same four specimens will be performed to the 300-strong audience, who will vote their favourite - the winner gets £1,000 each night. So potentially that adds £10,000 to the grand prize if one piece persistently wins the favoured slot. My guess is that Tuesday night’s winner, a knockabout black-comedy duo for a sour clown and a louche trapeze artist called It Needs Horses, will take quite a bit of the audience money over the 10 days simply because while the other three are heartbreakingly dim, this one is both dim and downright disgusting in parts (especially when the clown scratches the trapezist’s crotch for her).

Eva Recacha’s Begin to Begin: A Piece About Dead Ends has a diverting sound design, the three performers taped playing vocal games with the children’s ditty “There Was a Man Called Michael Finnegan”, but it is accompanied by fatally droopy flopping and flailing, with occasional outbursts of laboured star jumps. Bottom from the audience too.

Watch a clip from Fidelity Project

{vimeo}21192274{/vimeo}

With similar lack of deftness and oversupply of concept, the meek Freddie Opoku-Addaie and the intimidatingly muscular Frauke Requardt enact in Fidelity Project (see video sampler above) a clumsy, bottom-heavy movement dialogue while a popcorn machine cooks popcorn. If you can tear your eyes away from the popping, you will see the two performers wallop and nudge at each other, sticking their fingers into each other’s mouths - there were a lot of fingers in mouths with the clowns too - and I could not have cared less what kind of emotional relationship was going on between them or what the popcorn signified. Audience second choice (a long way behind the smutty clown).

At least Riccardo Buscarini and Antonio de la Fe Guedes have a joke with the prize - their entry is not any attempt at dance at all, but “non-verbal communication signs”. Cameo is a thin mime of a film noir, starring two leather Chesterfields, a decanter of whisky and two men and a woman gesturing their way through 20 minutes of what they overoptimistically describe as “a nod to Alfred Hitchcock”. Less murder mystery than murder mystification. Audience third choice.

So is it any wonder that one falls into Frederick Ashton’s dizzying star waltzes, vivid little private monologues and solemnly proud, love-redolent pas de deux with the relief of the starving being offered manna? Never mind the current cold, Disney-ish designs, some lumbering conducting by Pavel Sorokin and the ossified hamming of the Ugly Sisters - they can't take that choreography away from you.

• The Place Prize finals continue nightly at The Place, Euston, until Saturday, 16 April
• The Royal Ballet's Cinderella is performed until 6 May

Watch the Royal Ballet's Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg dance the ballroom pas de deux