We will announce a call for nominations for the 2012 ADSA ROB JORDAN PRIZE for the best book on a subject related to drama or theatre studies by an ADSA member in 2010-2011. ADSA members may nominate themselves or another ADSA member for this award (see below for information about the prize and eligibility).
 
If you require further information please contact Maryrose Casey at Monash University
telephone: 03 9905 2970 or email: maryrose.casey@arts.monash.edu.au
 
Rob Jordan Prize
 
The Rob Jordan Prize will be awarded every two years to the author of a book by an ADSA member which the judges deem to make a significant contribution to the study of theatre or drama studies. At present the prize is awarded in even-numbered years and is valued at $400.
 
Nominations can be made either by or on behalf of the author/s of the book. To be eligible, the book must be published in either of the two years prior to the award of the prize (i.e. for the 2010 prize, judges will accept the nomination of books published in 2008 or 2009.)
 
Each nomination should include three copies of the book being nominated and a brief statement about the book's importance. Nominations should be received by the deadline in the year in which the prize is to be awarded, though some special latitude might be made in the case of a book published at the end of the eligibility period.
 
To be eligible, the author  must have been a member of ADSA in the year in which the book was published. In the case of jointly-authored books, all authors should be members of ADSA in the year the book was published.
 
Preference will normally be given to monographs rather than edited books, anthologies of essays and so on.

Past Recipients

2010

Joint Winners:

• Helena Grehan Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age (Palgrave McMillan, 2009) and
• Kathy Leahy Lords and Larrikins: The Actor's Role in the Making of Australia (Currency House, 2009)

Helena Grehan's Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age is a groundbreaking work of contemporary critical scholarship, working across aesthetics, performance studies and philosophy, that challenges readers to consider questions of response and responsibility in the analysis of contemporary theatre performance. The book explores ways in which the forms of ethics developed by Emmanuel Levinas and others can be related to the spectatorship of live performance events. the implications of the encounter of the audience with the event are explored in a series of national and international case studies where a range of critical and philosophical scholarship is perceptively deployed to give perspective to first-hand accounts and to identify what issues are at stake aesthetically and performatively, as well as ethically and politically.

 

Kathy Leahy’s Lords & Larrikins: The Actor’s role in the making of Australia is also a work of groundbreaking research. Working with the questions, What does it mean to be an actor in Australia? and how have actors contributed to our notions of Australian society and identity?, this study focuses on the actor as a public figure. Through a series of case studies the book examines the male actor’s position in Australia on and off the stage. Looking at both the Lords of the stage and their public role as missionaries for the classics and British superiority and the Larrikins of low comedy and their satiric answers, the book examines major figures as influential and influenced social players from Barnett Levy and George Coppin through Roy Rene to John Bell and Garry McDonald.

2008

• Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo. Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cultural Transactions in Australasia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
  

Performance and Cosmopolitics is a pioneering study of cross-cultural theatre in the Australasian region, positioned within the broader context of a global performing arts market and continued international interest in the traditions and aesthetics of non-Western cultures. Gilbert and Lo deploy the concept of cosmopolitanism as a unique window into mainstream, avant-garde and community arts practices ranging from the 1850s to the present day. Arguing that indigenisation and Asianisation have constituted key strategies for forging Australian theatre's current cosmopolitan credentials, the book maps the history and impact of these processes and features detailed case studies to draw out their aesthetic, commercial, political and ethical dimensions.

While this study is grounded in a specific regional history and politics, it also serves as a paradigmatic study of cross-cultural arts transactions. By focusing on theatre's particular traditions of corporeality and presence, Performance and Cosmopolitics challenges some of the foundational principles of cosmopolitanism and asserts that its claim to a 'disinterested' global citizenship falters when confronted with the realpolitik of bodily praxis.

2006

•  Maryrose Casey. Creating Frames: Contemporary Indigenous Theatre, 1967-97 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2004).

Creating Frames provides the first significant social and cultural history of Indigenous theatre across Australia. As well as using archival sources and national and independent theatre company records, much of this history is drawn from interviews with individuals who have shaped contemporary Indigenous theatre in Australia -- including Bob Maza, Jack Charles, Gary Foley, Justine Saunders, Wesley Enoch, Ningali and John Harding. "Creating Frames" traces the journey behind a substantial national body of work and its importance in ensuring that Indigenous Voices are heard. (UQP)

2004

• Jane Goodall. Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order (London & New York: Routledge, 2002).

Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin reveals the ways in which the major themes of evolution were taken up in the performing arts during Darwin's adult lifetime and in the generation after his death.

The period 1830-1900 was the formative period for evolutionary ideas. While scientists and theorists investigated the law and order of nature, show business was more concerned with what was out of the natural order. Missing links and throwbacks, freak taxonomies and exotic races were favourite subject matter for the burgeoning variety theatre movement. Focusing on popular theatre forms in London, New York and Paris, Jane Goodall shows how they were interwoven with the developing debate about human evolution.

With this book, Goodall contributes an important new angle to the debates surrounding the history of evolution. She reveals that, far from creating widespread culture shock, Darwinian theory tapped into some of the long-standing themes of popular performance and was a source for diverse and sometimes hilarious explorations. (Routledge)

2002

• Julie Holledge and Joanne Tompkins. Women's Intercultural Performance (London & New York: Routledge, 2000).

This is the first in-depth examination of contemporary intercultural performance by women around the world. Contemporary feminist performance is explored in the contexts of current intercultural practices, theories and debates.
Holledge and Tompkins provide ways of thinking about and analysing contemporary performance and representations of the performing, female, culturally-marked body. The book includes discussions of:
* ritual performance by women from Central Australia and Korea
* the cultural exchange of A Doll's House and Antigone
* plays from Algeria, South Africa and Ghana
* the work of the Takarazuka revue company
* the market forces that govern the distribution of women and women's performance.
This is an essential read for anyone studying or interested in women's performance. (Routledge)

2000

• Gay McAuley. Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor :  University of Michigan Press, 1999).

Theater, as distinct from other dramatic media, is essentially a relationship between performer, spectator, and the space in which both come together. Space in Performance examines the way theater buildings function to frame the performance event, the organization of audience and practitioner spaces within the building, the nature of the stage and the modes of representation it facilitates, and the relationship between the real space of the theater and the fictional places that are evoked.

The book's theoretical and methodological framework is both semiotic and phenomenological, based in part from the seminal work of Anne Ubersfeld, from direct observation of the rehearsal process, and from documentation and analysis of professional performances. The situation of the academic observer in the rehearsal room has much in common with that of the ethnographer in the field, and contemporary ethnographic practice provides a third theoretical and methodological perspective to this study.

Performance studies is an emerging discipline, and it is still evolving appropriate methodologies. The multi-faceted approach adopted here will engage theater and performance studies specialists, those concerned with modes of representation in contemporary culture, and students of theater, semiotics, architecture, set design, acting and performance theory. It also offers a great deal to theater practitioners as well as to spectators interested in deepening their appreciation of theater art. It is written in a simple, accessible way, and the theory always emerges from descriptions of practice. (UMP)

and

• Helen Gilbert. Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).

Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre asserts the centrality of theater to the ongoing negotiations of the Australian context. By exploring ways in which ideas about race, gender, and nation are expressed in concrete theatrical contexts, the performative qualities of theatrical representation are revealed as compelling, important sites of critique.

Helen Gilbert discusses an exciting variety of plays, drawing examples from marginalized groups as well as from the theatrical mainstream. While fully engaged with the discourses of contemporary critical thought, Sightlines remains focused on the material stuff of the theater, grounding its discussion in the visual elements of costume, movement, and scenography. And although focused specifically on performance, the author's insistent interest in historical and political contexts also speaks to the broader concerns of cultural studies.

The book's recurrent concern with representations of Aboriginality, particularly in the works of nonindigenous playwrights, draws attention to racial politics as a perennial motif in postcolonial nations. Its illumination of the relationships between patriarchy and imperialism is supported by an extensive discussion of plays by and about women. This nomadic approach marks Sightlines as a groundbreaking study of recent Australian theater, a provocative application of postcolonial theory to the embodied qualities of theatrical representation. (UMP)