We are currently reviewing the scope and purpose of following TaPRA prizes:
David Bradby Award
Early Career Researcher Award
Editing Award
We will announce new arrangements/prizes in September 2020 and open nominations shortly afterwards.
TaPRA welcomes the nominations of collaborative or co-produced research. If co-created work is awarded the prize, the executive committee will work with the winners to negotiate an appropriate prize.
for The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan 2018).
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.
for Staging British South Asian Culture: Bollywood and Bhangra in British Theatre (Routledge, 2017)
for Madness, Art and Society: Beyond Illness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
for Theatre Aurality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
The Prize consists of a free conference place (membership fee, conference dinner and accommodation excluded) and a cheque for £200.
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.
for Staging British South Asian Culture: Bollywood and Bhangra in British Theatre (Routledge, 2017)
for Madness, Art and Society: Beyond Illness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
for Theatre Aurality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
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.
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.
for Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500-1900: Democracy, Disorder and the State (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
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.
for Contemporary Black British Playwrights (Palgrave, 2015)
for Dramaturgy and Architecture: Theatre, Utopia and the Built Environment (Palgrave, 2015)
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.
A History of the Berliner Ensemble (Cambridge University Press)
Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation (Palgrave)
Directing scenes and senses: the thinking of Regie (Manchester University Press)
Acts of Desire: Women, and Sex on Stage 1800-1930.(Oxford University Press)
Ancient Greek and Contemporary Performance: Collected Essays. (University of Exeter Press)
Immersive Theatres. Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. (Palgrave)
Echo’s Voice : The Theatres of Sarraute, Duras, Cixous and Renaude. (Legenda Books)
Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and Love. (Michigan University Press)
for the iPad app and book: Played in Britain: Modern British Theatre in 100 Plays
For the ‘Imagining Autism project’
Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances (Palgrave)
Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Palgrave)
for her book, The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London
Twentieth Century British Theatre: Art, Industry and Empire (Cambridge University Press)
Britain’s Had Talent: A History of Variety Theatre (Palgrave)
Contemporary Mise en Scene: Staging Theatre Today (Routledge)
Only current TaPRA members can submit nominations for our awards or elections. Each nomination requires a seconder, who must also be a current member.
Our 2021 conference will be hosted online in partnership with Liverpool Hope University.
Our 2021 conference will be hosted online in partnership with Liverpool Hope University.