The Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies has created an annual award for the Best Postgraduate Paper presented at an ADSA conference.

Purpose of the award

This award is designed to recognise research excellence in postgraduate studies.

Each year's winner is announced at the conclusion of the ADSA conference.

To be eligible for the award candidates must:

• nominate themselves for consideration to the conference convenors prior to the conference;
• be a currently enrolled postgraduate student;
• present an original paper at the conference;
• be a current student member of ADSA at the time of application;
• not hold a tenured position at a university; and
• not have previously been awarded the prize. 
  

Each year's winner is announced at the conclusion of the ADSA conference.

The Prize consists of $400 from ADSA and mentoring towards publication of the winning paper in Australasian Drama Studies.

This award is designed to recognise research excellence in postgraduate studies.

Recipients of the Award

2010

Winner

Anna Teresa Scheer for her paper "Challenging Theatre's Hidden Hierarchies: Chistoph Schilingensief's Theatrical Interventions in Hamburg"

Abstract: In October 1997, German artist, film and theatre director Christoph Schilingensief made his first major foray outside of the theatre in Hamburg, Germany with a a project titled Passion Impossible: 7 Day Emergency Call for Germany. This work took place in diverse public spaces in Hamburg over seven days and actively involved people from social groups usually excluded from cultural participation and in the making of performances, such as homeless people and drug addicts. Schilingensief identified the Schauspeilhause theatre—to which he had been invite—as a site of social exclusion and rejected it as avenue in which to rehearse and premiere a new work. Instead he sought to encourage the participation of socially marginalised groups in the form of activist-style events in the public arena.

This paper will examine Baz Kershaw's ideas of the hidden hierarchies of theatre which have underpinned its status as a form of cultural engagement which privileges social status and wealth. Schilingensief's direct intervention into what constitutes conventionally mainstream theatre practice underscores his confrontational relationship with this particular 'social institution'. His intervention into the everyday experiences of a destitute sub-strata of Hamburg's population, whose situation he viewed as a 'staging' or production, recalls the theories of Erving Goffman, in particular his influential work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Drawing on the theories of Goffman, this paper will firstly outline the events in Hamburg and their consequences. Secondly, following Goffman, I will consider the idea of everyday life as a staged reality in which roles are allocated to us by social circumstance and political policy. I will argue that by rejecting a theatre venue in favour of a series of performative events staged in public places, Schilingensief was—in line with Goffman's ideas—attempting to re-stage reality for socially critical purposes.

Short List:

Miranda Heckenberg for Discourses of Minimalism in the Contemporary Practice of Australian Scenographers"

Christopher Hay for "'Edgy, rockin' student theatre': Emergent Directors and the Avant-Garde" and

Robert Reid "Everyone's a Critic: Do blogs represent the democratisation of cultural comment or do they expose (strip bare) the ignorance and prejudices of a privileged few?"

Honorable Mention

Justine Shih Pearson for "Being and performing non-place: Notes from the airport"

Teresa Izzard for "Marber's After Miss Julie and The Flayed Angel: A somatic/bodymind approach to the creation of character" and

Sarah Thomasson for "Empty Spaces? Stripping Bare Performance in Found Space"

2009

• Cat Hope: Ka-Boom!—Experiencing music through vibration in the work of bass project Abe Sada
  

Abstract: As music and sound art close together, there is a possibility for different sound experiences that provide an expanded concept of listening—the embodiment of sound and music through physiological responses. Music composition, installation and performance created by focusing on low frequency sound offers a broader spectrum of listening experience below that provided by the generally perceived audio frequency range. Listening with the body and the spaces we occupy—both constructed and naturally occurring—is extended to a music that does not rely on traditional techniques to form and evolve.

This paper studies the work of bass project Abe Sada, which breaks apart ideas about music performance, sound art and installation by booming them with works that use vibration to activate architecture, audience bodies an a range of objects. Inspired by the American experimentalists of the 1960s—people such as Tony Conrad, La Monte Young and others—but also by installation artists and rock music, Abe Sada are an internationally-recognised project based in Perth committed to interrogating ideas about noise, rock performance, drone and sound art. They employ a unique combination of improvisation, performance technique and scoring to create works that range from warm and soothing to abrasive and extreme. Performing under stages, in open football fields, underground carparks and claustrophobic shop fronts—but never actually on stage—the group's works, over the last three years, including its successes and failures, will be examined in this paper.

Biography: Cat Hope is a multidisciplinary artist based in Perth, Western Australia whose work is grounded in sound. Trained as a classical flautist she later moved to bass playing, noise, improvisation, rock, video art and installation and is currently the head of composition and music technology at WAAPA, ECU. She is a passionate performer and researcher with an active international publication and touring schedule, as a soloist, academic and in her groups Abe Sada and Decibel. She runs a small label, Bloodstar Music, and is a founding member of sound art collective Metaphonica. Her research interests include low frequency sound, film music and new music performance.

2008

• Megan Hoffmann:  Is a Fashion Show the Place for a Political Message?  Investigating the Spectacle Dressed up in Ideas in Hussein Chalayan’s After Words.

Abstract: Hussein Chalayan is a fashion designer who often uses the fashion show as a performance space in which to explore socio-political themes not necessarily aligned with the commercial framing of the fashion system.  His 2000 Fall Ready-to-Wear fashion show, entitled After Words, thematically revolved around the idea of enforced migrancy and was a reaction on Chalayan’s part to the large-scale displacement of Kosovo Albanians from their homeland during the conflict of the 1990s.

The paper explores the multiple and disjunctive intended meanings presented by After Words as a commercial spectacle where the costumed body was foregrounded both as the theatrical subject in a showcase of style as well as a central element in the development of Chalayan’s socio-political narrative.  It offers an analysis of how the intended meanings of the performance were actualised through the lived experience of the theatrical event.  It contends that, in the spectatorial interpretation of After Words, the intended meaning of costume in Chalayan’s political narrative was disabled through its assimilation into an overriding fashion discourse.

Megan Hoffmann is completing a Master degree in the School of EMSAH at the University of Queensland.

 2007

• Ryan Hartigan '"They Watch Me as They Watch This" ­ Alfred Jarry, Symbolism and self as performance in fin de siecle Paris'.

Abstract: Since its production was greeted by riots in 1896, Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi has been considered amongst the most famous events in theatre history. The fame of the production, in tandem with a colourful personal mythology, makes Jarry a consistent inclusion in histories of the theatre as a whole and avant-garde theatre in particular. However, his eccentric behaviours have frequently been examined in the service of dismissing him as a purely attention seeking individual. Consequently, critical valuations of the production tend to be coloured by disapproval regarding the peculiarities of its author.

This paper examines Alfred Jarry's appropriation of the aesthetics of symbolist self-as-performance in fin de siècle Paris. Jarry's perceived eccentricities are often supplied in detail by his biographers, but are decontextualised and considered to be nothing more than an antagonistic and immature demonstration of attention seeking behaviour. However, when his behaviour is located within the salons of the belle époque it is far more significant in character: it demonstrates a profound understanding of the symbolist aesthetic of displaying artistic discourse by transforming the self into a work of art. It is Jarry's awareness and development of these conventions that proves crucial in his rapidly ccupying such a central place within the symbolist sphere, and enables him to position himself at the heart of the tumultuous event that was the production of Ubu Roi.

Biography: Ryan Hartigan has recently completed his Masters in Theatre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The thesis is a critical reevaluation of Alfred Jarry and Ubu Roi, examining the production's reception and perceived 'scandal' in relation to Symbolism and the theatre in fin-de-siècle Paris. He will shortly take up a place as a PhD candidate in Theatre Historiography at the University of Minnesota, where he has been awarded one of the prestigious Graduate School Fellowships for 2007. He is also a Chapman Tripp Award winning young director and founder of the acclaimed Theatre Pataphysical. He has taught at Victoria University of Wellington, Massey University, and Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School. His research interests include recontextualising the avant-garde, the ontology of representation, and human display as performance.

2006

• Caroline Wake (University of NSW) 'Neither Here Nor There: The Laramie Project in Australia'

Abstract: When running a search on the phrase "being there," not one but four books appeared with the phrase in their title, and all of these books concerned ethnography. This paper considers the relationship between "being there," ethnography, and peformance. While ethnographers have poached theories from performance studies (old habits die hard) in order to develop the concept of performance ethnography, performance studies scholars have yet to return the favour. The ethnographer Norman Denzin describes the work of Anna Deavere Smith as performance ethnography but do we in performance studies agree? Does his category work for other types of documentary performance? Can we label all documentary or verbatim performance as performance ethnography? Or, do we need to invert the terms and establish and elucidate the concept of ethnographic performance?

The discourse on documetnary film has reinvigorated itself by reconsidering its entanglement with ethnography and perhaps it is time that the discourse on documentary theatre and performance does the same. This paper examines the Tectonic Theater Project's documentary play The Laramie Project, and more specifically its staging in Australia in order to investigate the concepts of performance ethnography, ethnographic performance, and autoethnographic performance. I argue that The Laramie Project funcitons as both an ethnographic and autoethnographic performance since as a document it shares methodological and ontological similarities with more convenitonal ethnographic documents. Moreover, its Sydney staging also functions as both an ethnographic performance and an autoethnographic performance, despite the director's best efforst to eliminate or elide the autoethnographic elements in the work. Finally, in presenting my own investigations and reactions to the play, I offer an (auto)ethnographic performance of my own.

Biography: Caroline Wake is a doctoral candidate in the School of Media, Film and Theatre at the Univesrity of New South Wales. Her research considers the emegence of the autoethnoraphic, both within critical discourse and performance.

2005

• Carol Langley (University of NSW) 'Borrowed Voice: The Art of Lip-Synching in Sydney Drag'

Abstract: Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn and Sydney drag queen Claire de Lune. Three very different artists with one thing in common - they have all taken part in performances that involved lip-synchronisation. Accepted in the Hollywood musical, maligned in the music industry, and acknowledged as art for the marriage of voice and aniated character in animation, lip-synching is a mainstay of Sydney drag. In that arena, it is not only a key element of the gender toolkit, but also a vehicle for enriching the drag act.

One aspect of drag performance is the layering that occurs between performer and persona, and persona and act - the physical layering (the strata of makeup, wigs upon natural hair, costuming that is often peeled off tier by teir, from number to number), the gender layering, and so on. For the theorist, the penetration of these layers may be, in effect, a particular kind of "journey to the interior". Lip-synching can also be viewed as another layering mechanism.

This paper presents drag lip-synching's colourful history, the skill and technique involved, the complexity of its usage on Sydney stages, and related video footage. It then goes on to discuss its effect on and significance in the drag act, and associated gender- and non-gender-based theoretical implications.

Biography: Carol Langley is currently researching drag performance for her PhD in Theatre at University of NSW. The research project of her MA was also on drag, and in between completing her Masters and commencing her PhD, she wrote a book on Sydney drag, which is being published by Currency Press.

2004

• Alyson Campbell (University of Melbourne) 'Experiencing Kane: Sarah Kane's 'Experiential' Theatre in Performance'

Abstract:

'Performance is visceral. It puts you in direct physical contact with thought and feeling'

British playwright Sarah Kane's work was greeted with media hysteria and cultish fanaticism. What was it about the images - verbal, visual and aural - that created such extreme reactions? Kane propounded a theory of a theatre that she called 'experiential': it was to be lived through by the spectator not only intellectually but viscerally and emotionally.

I propose that Kane's 'experiential theatre' demands that the body be the site of the theatre encounter. To do so it exploits the 'lived bodiliness' of the spectator - in the early works through the use of visual and aural assault, but in the later works through the vibratory effect of poetic language and imagery.

This paper considers the interplay of text, performer and spectator in the shared space of performance as a phenomenological experience. Merleau-Ponty's assertion that 'to perceive is to render oneself present to something through the body' provides a reference point for an exploration of how Kane's theatre 'feels' to the spectator.

2003

• Jenny Leong (University of Sydney) (inaugural award) 'Applauding Posterity at the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive'

Abstract:

'Ladies and Gentlemen, we're honored to announce that Angels in America: Millennium Approaches has been chosen by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to be videotaped and preserved for posterity in the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive. The performance you will see today will become a part of theater history. We anticipate that this will not [audience applause over the announcement] interfere in any way with your enjoyment of today's performance. Thank you for your cooperation and we hope that you enjoy the play [more applause].'

The announcement made to an audience before the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive makes a recording.

For the last three years my research has been focused on the documentation of performance; my PhD thesis is investigating the act of recording a theatre performance on video and what purpose it serves. Before looking outwards at international practices I was researching a practice that in Australia was disparate, unmentioned and contested. In 2002, I undertook research overseas at institutions involved in the creation, collection and preservation of video recordings of theatre performance. Subsequently, from an international perspective, I discovered that I was writing about an established, celebrated and incredibly valued practice supported by theatre scholars, practitioners and other members of society.

In this paper I will describe and discuss the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive in New York, with specific focus on the acceptance of the institution by those working in the field of performance and the reception of the institutions by the broader community. I will then turn inwards to explore a number of Australia specific issues. Through an analysis of the paradigm shift that I encountered when looking beyond the Australian approach to creating, collecting and preserving performance documentation I will highlight a number of factors that inadvertently prevent the implementation of such models in Australia