Purpose of the award

This award is designed to recognise research excellence in English-language articles anywhere in the world in the broad field of drama, theatre and performance studies.

Eligibility

• The Award is open to all financial members of ADSA.
• The publication period is January to December 2011.
• The winner is announced at the ADSA conference.
• The value of the prize is $400. 

Judges for the award in 2012 are Denise Varney (University of Melbourne), Jacqueline Lo (Australian National University) and Lisa Warrington (University of Otago).

Nominations
Nominations are invited by authors, journal editors and interested scholars, specifying full reference for the work nominated and accompanied by a photocopy of the article or chapter.

Deadline: Monday 10th April 2012. Please send an electronic/scanned copy of the article or chapter, plus full reference for the work to:

Guidelines for judges

Marlis Thiersch

Dr Marie Louise Matilde (Marlis) Thiersch (1916-1992) was, with Philip Parsons, one of the co-founders in 1977 of the Australasian Drama Studies Association. She was born in Dusseldorf and lived in China before coming to Australia in 1939 to settle in Adelaide, where she gained her BA and MA, teaching in German Language and Literature at the University of New South Wales.

From 1974 until her retirement she taught in the Australian Theatre Studies Programme in the School of Drama, University of New South Wales, and was a committed promoter of Australian playwriting. From 1979 she was Director of the Australian branch of the international Theatre Institute where she worked selflessly to promote Australian theatre's international contacts. From 1972 she became a foundation member of the Australian Playwrights Conference and organised nine annual conferences. Her tireless energy and her enthusiasm for promoting Australian theatre and communicating between the academy and the profession is commemorated in this research award by the region's leading tertiary Theatre Studies association.

Past recipients of the award

2011

Winner

• Helena Grehan (Murdoch University) "Aalst: Acts of Evil, Ambivalence and Responsibility" in Theatre Research International No. 35.1 (2010): 4-16

This year’s Award goes to a very deserving scholar and long serving member of this Association, Helena Grehan, for her journal article Aalst: Acts of Evil, Ambivalence and Responsibility’. Dr Grehan’s submission stood out for its elegance of form, the clarity of its writing and the depth of its scholarship. This is an article deeply engaged with critical theory, cogently focusing the work of Agamben and Levinas to illuminate analysis of a work of contemporary performance about a deeply confronting judicial case, of parents on trial for the murder of their two children. The author’s voice drives the commentary. She engages the reader at all stages of the argument, taking them with her into a deep consideration of the relationship between the original event and its layers of representation in performance. This article comes out of Grehan’s long term engagement with the ethics of representation and spectatorship. It offers a tightly focused but nuanced analysis, balancing the rigorous application of theory and a playful, meditative and clearly performative engagement with the topic, to discuss issues raised for the spectator by this particular work in a series of productions in different cultural locations, in Belgium, Scotland and Australia.

Honourable Mention

• Will Peterson (Monash University) "Performing Indigenity in the Cordillera: Dance, Identity and Politics in the Highlands of Luzon" in Asian Theatre Journal No. 27.2 (2010): 246-268

A special commendation to Dr Will Peterson, for his research on community-based performance in the highlands of Luzon, The Philippines. In this article, Peterson makes a new and important contribution to theatre anthropology, offering a fresh take on traditional approaches to field work by way of performance studies. He adopts an innovative theoretical standpoint on the question of Indigeneity, observing his chosen subjects and their cultural location through the lens of postcolonial theory, and he offers the reader both well-chosen photographic illustrations and an intriguing level of descriptive detail as a way in to the argument presented.

Short List

• Suzanne Little (University of Otago) "Re-Presenting the Traumatic Real: Douglas Wright's Black Milk" in Dance and Politics ed. Alexandra Kolb, Bern: Peter Lang, 2010: 233-254.  
• Glen McGillivray (University of Sydney) "Pleasure Out of Suffering: Negotiating Material Reality through Fetishism and Disavowal in Food Court" in About Performance No. 10 (2010): 93-106.

2010

• Paul Dwyer and Liza-Mare Syron (University of Sydney) "Protocols of Engagement: 'Community Cultural Development' Encounters an Urban Aboriginal Experience" in About Performance No. 9: 169-191.

2009

• Gay McAuley (University of Sydney) "Not magic but work: Rehearsal and the Production of Meaning" in Theatre Research International, 33: 276-288.

2008

• Ian Maxwell (University of Sydney) "The Ritualization of Performance (Studies)" in Graeme St John (ed) Victor Turner and Cultural Performance, New York: Berghan Books, 2008.

2007

• Veronica Kelly (UQ)  "An Australian Idol of Modernist Consumerism: Minnie Tittel Brune and the Gallery Girls", Theatre Research International, vol. 31, no. 1, 2006, pp. 17-36.

2006

• Jonathan Bollen (UNE / Flinders) "Remembering masculinities in the theatre of war", Australasian Drama Studies, no. 46, April 2005, pp.3-19.

2005

• Rachel Fensham (Monash University) "Mrs Patrick Campbell as 'hell cat': Reading the Surface Histories of a Female Body"  in Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, vol. 30, no. 2, Winter 2003.

2004

• Helen Gilbert (University of Queensland) "Black and White and Re(a)d All Over Again: Indigenous Minstrelsy in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Theatre" published in Theatre Journal, "Theatre and Activism", vol. 55, no. 4,  December 2003. 679-698.

2003

• Ed Scheer (University of NSW) "What does an avatar want: Stelarc's e-motions" published in The Cyborg Experiments, Joanna Zylinska (ed.) (London and New York: Continuum Press, 2002) pp.81-100.

2002

• Peta Tait, (Theatre Studies, La Trobe) "Fleshed, Muscular Phenomenologies: across sexed and queer circus bodies" in Body Show/s, ed. Peta Tait, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000, pp. 60-78.

2001

• Jacquline Lo (Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, ANU) "Beyond Happy Hybridity: Performing Asian-Australian Identities"  in alter/asians: Asian-Australian identities in art, media and popular culture, ed. Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law and Mandy Thomas, Annandale: Pluto Press, 2000, pp.152-68.

1999

• Veronica Kelly (Department of English, University of Queensland) '"Who's the Bigger Dill?": The Madhouse in Recent Australian Drama' in The Body in the Library, ed. Leigh Dale and Simon Ryan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998). Series: Cross/Cultures - Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English.

1998

• Jane Goodall (University of Western Sydney) 'Transferred Agencies: Performance and the Fear of Automatism'. The text can be accessed at Theatre Journal.

1997

• Robert Jordan (University of New South Wales) 'Visualising the Sydney Theatre, 1796'.