Dancer Bonnie Doets, who graduated from the National Ballet Academy, has been awarded the Gouden Zwaan 2013 dance prize. The winner was announced during the Dutch Dance Festival in Maastricht.

Doets has been a dancer with the Rotterdam-based dance company Scapino Ballet for twenty years. She was awarded the Gouden Zwaan for her enduring contribution to Dutch dance.

The jury calls her ‘the personification of talent, creativity, ambition and persistence’. “Her movements are grounded, lucid and powerfully incisive. Subtly and without embellishment and with a visceral power she instils every emotion in her dance with the precisely the right impetus.”

The winners of the VSCD dance prizes (known as the ‘swans’) are Bonnie Doets (Gouden Zwaan), Club Guy & Roni for the production ‘Midnight Rising’ (most impressive dance production of 2013) and dancer Medhi Walerski for his role in ‘School of Thought’ by Nederlands Dans Theater I (best dance performance of 2013). Also, last weekend during the Dutch Dance Festival, the Dioraphte Prize was awarded to Keren Levi and the Prize of the Dutch Dance Festival Maastricht was presented to Giulio D’Anna.