Pascale Aebischer

for Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

The judges agreed that Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the Technologies of Performance offers an innovative perspective on the contemporary and historical ways that theatrical performances mediate, stratify, train, and create different forms of acting and spectatorship. The implications of the argument of this book extend far beyond the focus on Shakespeare and, indeed, theatre, demonstrating how dramaturgies of past and present intermingle, with old and new techne revealing and making possible complex productions of events and modes of spectatorship. This accomplished book is prescient, erudite, rigorous and beautifully written.

Helen Nicolson, Nadine Holdsworth and Jane Milling

for The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre

The judges felt that Ecologies of Amateur Theatre offers a rigorous, engaging, overdue intervention into dominant presumptions – in theatre scholarship and professional theatre practice – about the ‘value’ of amateur theatre. This is a thoroughly researched, theoretically astute, critically vibrant and methodologically innovative approach to questions of cultural practice and theatre touching deeply on a range of issues of very broad interest, including craft, capital, feeling, temporality and much more. The monograph upends multiple presumptions and genuinely offers our field new and significant knowledge about a much-maligned sector. The authors research with feeling, which is refreshing and highly appropriative given the focus of the work: this is a valuably self-reflexive attempt to locate practices and objects of study without fixing either rigidly which offers an inspiring model to others. The engagement with those ‘studied’ is sensitive and respectful and the inclusion of journal entries brought the voices of the researchers, as well as the subjects of the research, into clear view.

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.

Jim Davis

for Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

The judges felt that the book moved adroitly across concept, example (actor), and exemplification (illustration) to account for the reciprocity of interest, nomenclature, and patronage between Georgian-era performers and painters. Without a shred of pedantry readers are coached in the criteria by which to understand what it means for a painter to capture something “inherently theatrical” about a specific character yet also incorporate the accumulation of a performer’s reputation and the epitome of their unique technique.

Sally Mackey

For her work and leadership on the project Challenging Concepts of Liquid Place.

The judges felt that from inside, from outside, this project shows change towards place in action and declares its ambition for further work. It is the work of considered scholarship and practice: far reaching, versatile, inclusive and impactful both for the communities with which it worked and for the academic sector which TaPRA represents.

Duška Radosavljevic

For Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century (Palgrave)

Kate Dorney & Frances Gray

for the iPad app and book: Played in Britain: Modern British Theatre in 100 Plays

Jacky Bratton

for her book, The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London

Aoife Monks

For her book, The Actor in Costume (Palgrave)

Heike Roms

For her project ‘It was Forty Years Ago Today: Locating the History of Performance Arts in Wales’