A CANBERRA choreographer is one of eight artists competing for the 2016 Keir Choreographic Award.

The eight commissioned artists are James Batchelor, Sarah Aiken, Chloe Chignell, Ghenoa Gela, Martin Hansen, Alice Heyward, Rebecca Jensen and Paea Leach.

We can confidently claim James Batchelor as one of us. In recent years he has divided his time between Melbourne and Canberra, where he was born, and was awarded a Canberra Critics Circle award last year. Batchelor’s most recent manifestation in Canberra was as choreographer to Stephen Sondheim’s “Company,” staged at The Q in October.

Batchelor’s work “Metasystems” was originally commissioned for the inaugural Keir Choreographic Award and has since been presented in Canberra, Melbourne and Bangkok and currently touring in France, Italy and China. His work “Island” is an installation documenting experimentation in the world’s most remote islands and an upcoming project will take him on a two–month research voyage to Heard Island in the Southern Ocean.

If the name Chloe Chignell sounds familiar, it is. A dance artist based in Melbourne, she has been working for Batchelor and in 2014 she choreographed “POST PHASE: The Summit is Blue” presented by The Canberra Theatre, for which she was awarded a Space Grant at Dancehouse and a residency at QL2 dance in 2015.

Right now, the selected artists are developing their new works, the eight commissioned works will have a premiere season – the semi-finals – at Melbourne’s Dancehouse in late April and four will be selected by the jury to participate in the Sydney season presented by Carriageworks in May 2016 – the finals – when they will compete for the award, which includes a cash prize of $30,000 for first prize and $10,000 for an audience choice prize.

The 2016 jury will consist of Bojana Cveji?, a performance theorist and performance-maker based in Brussels, Pierre Bal-Blanc, the Documenta 14 curator and art critic based in Athens and Paris, US-based choreographer Sarah Michelson, Perth International Arts Festival artistic director Wendy Martin and founder or the Keir Foundation Phillip Keir.

The biennial award, which began in 2014, is dedicated to the commissioning of new choreographic work and to promoting innovative, experimental and cross-art form practice in contemporary dance.

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UPDATE: We have been told by several alert readers that Chloe Chignell is also a true blue Canberran, confirmed by the director of the QL2 Centre for Dance, Ruth Osborne, who describes her as “a very dedicated Quantum Leaper for many years.”

What a pity that neither her official CV nor description of her by the Keir Choreographic Award people, reflects this happy fact.