TaPRA is delighted to announce the winners of this year’s research awards:

The David Bradby TaPRA Award for Research in International Theatre and Performance 2017 has been awarded to Kélina Gotman, for Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (Oxford University Press, 2018). This substantial volume constructs a compelling picture of ‘choreomania’ – of mad, disorderly movement in public space – drawing on rigorous, extensive archival research and travelling through a wide range of disciplinary fields and methodologies, from psychiatry to sociology, from ethnography to journalism. An outstanding book that enriches dance studies and performance studies, it places ‘choreomania’ within historical, medical, political and social contexts, while also demonstrating how past events still resonate and have relevance today.

Shortlisted: Tony Fisher, Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500-1900: Democracy, Disorder and the State (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

The TaPRA Early Career Research in Theatre/Performance Prize 2017 has been awarded to Margherita Laera, for work on ‘Translation, Adaptation, Otherness: “Foreignization” in Theatre Practice’ (www.translatingtheatre.com). Launched right at the point when the UK’s Brexit referendum was reaching its explosive conclusion, the judges felt that the ‘Translation, Adaptation, Otherness’ project represents an important – and deeply timely – investigation of how theatre in translation can be used to address contemporary tensions between varying cultures and languages by disrupting audiences’ expectations. Identifying and addressing a unique problem in a highly innovative way, the project constitutes a significant expansion of our current knowledge of theatre in translation and adaptation, with major implications for both performance scholarship and practice.

Shortlisted: Sarah Grochala, The Contemporary Political Play: Rethinking Dramaturgical Structure (Bloomsbury, 2017)

Joanne Scott, Intermedial Praxis and Practice as Research: ‘Doing-Thinking’ in Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

The TaPRA Prize for Editing (Edited Collection or Special Issue) 2017 has been awarded to Dee Heddon and Dominic Johnson, for It’s all Allowed: the Performances of Adrian Howells (Live Art Development Agency and Intellect, 2016). The judges felt that the collection was an intimate response to Howells’s work, but one that is also a profound meditation on the potential effects of performance itself. Carefully curated with a significant eye to detail, the volume draws together essays written by a diverse selection of contributors who have used a range of forms (critical, impressionistic, interview, etc), but nevertheless sustains a consistency of argument, message, and voice, supported by an introduction which weaves together the different contributions that comprise the volume with new material and extensive references. This labour of love is a critical volume that will be useful to readers; it is also a beautiful object in its own right with extensive illustration and supporting materials, in an impressive layout.

Shortlisted: Jonathan Pitches and Stefan Aquilina, Stanislavsky in the World: the System and its Transformations Across Continents (Bloomsbury, 2017)

Many congratulations to our winners and runners up. Prizes will be presented at this year’s conference in Aberystwyth, where last year’s David Bradby TaPRA Award winner, Jim Davis, will give the David Bradby lecture.