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It Needs Horses should never have galloped away with the audience vote, still less the UK’s biggest choreography prize. Maybe it’s time for AV? So there I was the other night, at the finals of the Place prize for dance – the UK’s biggest choreography competition – and my guest, a Paris-based producer of considerable experience, turned to me and said: “I have a bad feeling about this.” She was worried that the piece we both ranked lowest – Ben Duke and Raquel Meseguer’s It Needs Horses – would win the £25,000 prize. Nah, I said, it won’t come to that. Shortly afterwards, it came to that. Should I have been surprised? Over nine of the 10 nights of the finals, the audience vote – worth £1,000 in prize money each time – had already gone to It Needs Horses, which is a pretty clear indication of the people’s choice. The fact that the judging panel selected the same piece was surely a simple vindication of that choice: it deserved to win, and there was a consensus on that. Actually, there was little consensus. The judges for the final – five representatives from different fields (Hannah Barry, visual arts; Zena Edwards, poetry; Rupert Goold, theatre; Matthew Peacock, opera; Laurie Uprichard, dance) – disagreed vociferously over the decision. The final verdict was not the outcome of consensus, but of a battle. There was, however, consensus within – but not between – two other arenas. One was in the judging panel for the semi-finals, where everyone had a dance background (Laurie Uprichard again, Alistair Spalding of Sadler’s Wells, choreographer/artistic directors Janet Smith and Shobana Jeyasingh, and me). That panel was near-unanimous in selecting its top three to put forward to the finals, and It Needs Horses was not in the running. The fourth finalist was selected by the other consistent locus of consensus: the audience. As in the final round, the semi-finals saw It Needs Horses win the audience vote by a considerable margin. Dance critics, meanwhile, had no consensus with anyone. The Telegraph favoured Frauke Requardt and Freddie Opoku-Addaie. The Independent liked It Needs Horses, but the Guardian’s Judith Mackrell thought it “shockingly lazy”. The Observer , Guardian and Time Out rated Eva Recacha top (while in the audience vote she regularly vied for last place with Riccardo Buscarini and Antonio de la Fe Guedes). And dismissing the lot of them, theartsdesk.com basically wished for something, anything, that was a bit more like Ashton ‘s Cinderella, a ballet created in 1948. Me? I thought the considerable stage presence of the two performers (Chris Evans and Anna Finkel) masked a fatal lack of substance in the work itself; that it went for cheap thrills (some sex, violence, some titters); and – call me elitist, now – that in the end the audience voted for the work that most set out to manipulate them. Dissent, popular opinion, vote-courting, competition – this is clearly a political arena. And right now, we’re very aware that political winners and losers aren’t some straightforward reflection of democracy in action, but at least partly produced by the voting systems that elect them. The Place prize is certainly not all about winning or losing: as a seedbed for new ideas and a launchpad for new work, it affords many benefits simply for participating. But there is money and publicity at stake, and there is a final winner announced. And right now I wonder: should the Place prize forgo its winner-takes-all system and adopt something more like AV ? Would that reveal dissent more strongly, or would it favour middle-ground compromises? Results would certainly change simply by being measured differently. Perhaps some entries would too. Dance Awards and prizes Sanjoy Roy guardian.co.uk