Application Procedures

ADSA invites entries for the Philip Parsons Prize for Performance as Research. ADSA was formed in 1977 at the instigation of the late Dr Philip Parsons, senior lecturer in drama at the University of New South Wales. To commemorate his lifelong interest in making connections between theatre scholarship and the professional stage, ADSA has established an annual Philip Parsons Prize for a senior student (third year, honours or postgraduate) undertaking a Performance As Research (PAR) project. The Prize consists of a $400 financial award. Winning entrants will also have their work featured on the ADSA website. The winning entrant will be announced at the annual ADSA conference in June.

To be eligible for the award candidates must:

• Have undertaken the project between 1st January and 31st December 2011.
• Have been enrolled at the time the project was undertaken at a university or other tertiary institution in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, South East Asia or the Pacific Island region.
• Provide the judges with a completed cover sheet (see the form provided).
• Provide the judges with a completed document that addresses the application criteria.
• Provide the judges with one brief (up to 500 words) appraisal of the Performance as Research project by the candidate’s supervisor.
• Provide the judges with one brief (up to 500 words) appraisal of the performance by and examiner or independent viewer addressing the criteria (see the instructions provided).
• Provide the judges with video documentation of the project including either a DVD of the performance or a 2-minute video clip featuring some of the highlights of the performance.
• Be a current student member of ADSA at the time of application.
• Submit a completed application before close of business on Monday 30 April April 2012.

While candidates may have produced several creative works as part of their research, the PPP judges ask that candidates select one performance output as an exemplar of their research that can be judged for the prize. Applicants should refer to the discussion paper on Performance as Research available on the ADSA website. Applicants may also wish to refer to the Performance as Research Guidelines posted on the ADSA website for information on the criteria used to judge entrants. They may also find it useful to refer to scripts emerging from two previous Parsons Prize-winning projects which are published in Australasian Drama Studies, 31 (October 1997): Tim Benzie’s Personal Fictions and Stacey Callaghan’s Still Raw.

Judges for the 2012 prize will Dr. Rand Hazou (Convenor), Dr Leah Mercer, and Dr Janys Hayes.

Download the Application Form.

For More information Contact:

Rand Hazou
Theatre and Drama Program
La Trobe University
Bundoora VIC 3086
r.hazou@latrobe.edu.au

Recipients of the Award

2011

Winner

Rachel Swain for "Burning Daylight"

The 2011 Philip Parsons Prize for Performance as Research is awarded to Rachel Swain from Melbourne University for her PhD entitled “Ways of Listening: Dramaturgy as Deep Mapping in Intercultural-Indigenous Performance’” encompassing the performance project Burning Daylight. The project developed by the intercultural performance company Marrugeku, and co-conceived by Swain with Dalisa Pigram, explored the transcultural transactions of Asian and Indigenous experience of Broome in Western Australia . Working within an indigenous framework of cultural production, the project applies the term ‘intercultural-indigenous’ to describe the performance-based research responding to the cultural specificity of Broom’s history and pearling industry which has produced and sustained a mixture of inter-racial stories connections and experiences between the traditional Aboriginal, Malay, Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese communities. The central question that the research project investigates is how to consider and develop a hybrid intercultural performance dramaturgy developed in Indigenous contexts that responds to the site-specific ecology of place. In responding to this inquiry the Burning Daylight performance project demonstrates the importance of indigenous storytelling as a form of embodied knowledge that is connected to landscape and develops and articulates a new model of dramaturgy termed ‘listening to country’. The inquiry adopts research methodologies that attempt to expose, document and archive the practitioners material thinking in the process of making a new piece of dance-theatre. Beginning in 2003 with preliminary research in Broom with Indigenous and community elders, the project involved multiple stages of development involving ongoing community liaisons and discussions guided by senior Yawuru Law man and traditional owner Patrick Dodson. The performance project culminated in the premier of a contemporary dance theatre production staged as part of Broom’s Shinju Masturi Festival in 2006, a performance season of the work staged in Zurich, Switzerland at the Zürcher Theatre in 2007, followed in 2009 by a five-week national tour of the production to Broome, Perth, Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart. The dissertation was submitted in 2010 . The research also culminated in the publication and distribution of Burning Daylight: Place, History and Community - a book that includes an interview with Patrick Dodson, essays by Ian Maxwell, Jacqueline Lo and Kerrie Schaefer, and a DVD containing full documentation of the 2009 production shot by acclaimed indigenous film-maker Warwick Thornton. Measured simply by the impressive list of research outcomes, the project sets a new benchmark for what can be achieved by performance as research projects. The contribution to knowledge that the project makes is also measured by the new model of dramaturgical practice that the research has uncovered which will no doubt guide future investigations in the field and which has also laid the ground-work for articulating the development of new and innovative forms of Indigenous-Intercultural dance and performance.

Honourable Mention

Bert Van Dijk for "Towards a New Pacific Theatre"

An honourable mention goes to Bert Van Dijk for his exciting project Towards a New Pacific Theatre submitted as part of his PhD thesis at Victoria University, Wellington and the accompanying performance event Ex-Isle of Strangers. The site-specific performance and research project sets out to develop a model of theatre-making that articulates the cultural, geographical and spiritual specificity of Aetearoa/New Zealand in the context of the Asian Pacific region. The performance as research project brings together and interrogates divergent artistic practices drawn from Maori, European and Asian traditions in the articulation of a new model of Pacific Theatre praxis. The performance project tests and presents a case study which stands as the first exemplar of the proposed model of New Pacific Performance which draws from Whaere Tapere (pre-European Maori performance traditions), contemporary European performance, and traditional Noh Theatre.

2010

• no award

2009

• Ben Knapton (Queensland University of Technology) for Gaijin

2008

• Leah Mercer (Queensland University of Technology) for Complementary and the Uncertainty Principle as Aesthetic Principles. The Practice and Performance of The Physics Project.

2007

• David Fenton (Queensland University of Technology) for 'Unstable Acts' A practitioner's case study of the poetics of postdramatic theatre and intermediality

2006

• no award

2005

• Liza-Mare Syron (University of Wollongong) for EPHEMERA: Aboriginality, Reconiciliation, Urban Perspectives

2004

• Julie Robson (Queensland University of Technology) for Songs of knowledge: the Sirens in theory and performance

2003

• Amanda Lynch and Neal Harvey (University of Queensland)

2002

• no award

2001

• no award

2000

• Michael Noble (Murdoch University) for A body in 22 cycles

1999

• no award

1998

• Sandra d'Urso (La Trobe)

1997

•  Cracka Theatre Company - Nigel Pean, Mary-Ann Hunter, Stacey Callaghan, Steph Kehoe (University of Queensland) for Boneless Chicken Becht

1996

• Stacey Callaghan (University of New England) for still raw

1995

• Tim Benzie (University of Queensland) for Personal Fictions