Christina Banalopoulou

‘Toward a Performative Epistemology of the Archive: Archival Enactment as Rum Futurity’, Archival Science, vol. 25, 2025, article 44.

Christina Banalopoulou’s ‘Toward a Performative Epistemology of the Archive: Archival Enactment as Rum Futurity’ was selected for its outstanding originality, rigour, and contribution to theatre and performance studies. Drawing on sensitive and self-reflexive ethnographic research conducted with and through the Rum community, the article develops the innovative concept of ‘archival enactment’, offering a nuanced account of archives as living, performative sites of memory, belonging, and futurity. The judges praised the work’s engagement with an underrepresented community and its careful theorisation of how archives are experienced, embodied, and activated through performance. By moving beyond institutional and state-centred constructions of national identity, the article provides important new insights into the relationship between performance, archives, and collective memory, while opening new avenues for thinking about minoritarian histories, community formation, and alternative futures.

Chengyu Tan

‘Charting Progress: Chinese Drag Performances 2010–2020’, in Drag Vistas and Visions: Drag in a Changing Scene, Volume 3, Methuen Drama, 2025.

Heath Pennington

‘Consent Work in Intimacy Coordination and Adult Content Creation’, Porn Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 2026, pp. 61–76.

PRIZES

Maria De Simone

Returning to the Scene of the Crime: Gendered and Racialised Violence in Ana Mendieta’s Rape Scene (1973)

The essay provides a thorough and nuanced reading of how Ana Mendieta’s The Rape Scene engages with the racializing and gendered logics of legal redress in the relation to sexual violence. While much has been written on this performance, this article is notable for its careful attention to trauma and affect, drawing on theories of forensics, re-enactment, and queer of colour critique. It is an exemplary performance analysis, one that is novel for its revisionary claims and sustained commitments to tying together debates around (mis)recognition in both performance and law. The essay’s focus on Mendieta’s important performance aids to foreground experiences and perspectives of Latinx artists in histories of performance art. This is an intricate and erudite piece that, among other things, provides a teachable resource for discussing a very difficult work and demonstrates how scholars can engage ethically and politically with art having to do with histories of racialised sexual violence. The tone of the argument – often raising the questions that cannot be answered but that are key for understanding the work’s power – resonates with Mendieta’s piece in asking of the twenty-first century reader important (yet unanswerable) questions about spectatorship and complicity in the face of acts of (gendered, racialised, sexual, patriarchal or state) violence. The focus on the effectiveness of cruelty as an aesthetic and political strategy is a further strong intervention in discourses surrounding the use of trigger warnings.

Savannah Whaley

‘Body as Artifact: A Value-Theoretical Reading of Ana Mendieta and Cassils’, TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 67, no. 4, 2023, pp. 25–41.

This is an impressively rigorous and intellectually rich article that offers a nuanced Marxist-feminist analysis of body-based performance through the works of Ana Mendieta and Cassils. The essay excels in its detailed, sensitive readings of these artists, centring their practices with equal weight to critical theory—a balance that enhances both the conceptual and affective dimensions of the work. It advances scholarship on visual-body-based performance by innovatively connecting theories of value, gender, and abstraction to the material and aesthetic dimensions of performance. Particularly notable is the author’s focus on how capitalist devaluation and gendered violence intersect with artistic expression, situating this analysis within broader postcolonial and anti-queer/transphobic frameworks. The writing is conceptually sophisticated, particularly in its treatment of the violence of gender and colonial capitalism, and offers a compelling critique of how categorisation distorts artistic and bodily meaning. The author’s engagement is marked by intensity and enthusiasm for the work itself, offering rich and vivid descriptions that make the theoretical stakes feel grounded and urgent. Overall, this is a powerful and timely article that expands the field’s understanding of performance, value, and embodiment, particularly in the context of gendered and racialised violence.

Martin Young

‘In Memory of the Q-File: Spontaneity, Digital Automation, and Deskilling in Theatre Lighting’, TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 68, no. 1, 2024, pp. 143–156.

Jaswinder Blackwell-Pall

‘The “System” of Service: Emotional Labour and the Theatrical Metaphor’, in Feelings and Work in Modern History: Emotional Labour and Emotions about Labour, edited by Agnes Arnold-Forster and Alison Moulds, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 215–233.

Swati Arora

‘A manifesto to decentre theatre and performance studies’, Studies in Theatre and Performance 41.1 (2021): 12-20

The panel unanimously recognised the bold inroads this short piece has made into the field of Theatre and Performance Studies, and the radically nuanced and rigorously informed ways that it has in the past three years already become a regularly deployed teaching tool and talking point across the discipline. Incisive, unapologetic, candid, and lucid, as well as deeply transnational and rooted in performance pedagogy as well as critical theory of the Global North and South, this article sounds a clarion call to readers to rethink decolonial praxis and ‘decentre’ theatre and performance studies institutionally and para-institutionally at once. While noting that this short piece is already today deeply aligned with the new organisational prerogatives of TaPRA as a broad-based member group, the panel also applauded the power and speed with which this article has become such a key resource. Nothing is lacking in critical economy; rather the purposeful, pithy and vivid way it performs the disciplinary and discursive unravelling of which it speaks commend it as distinctive piece of writing that has already marked the field.

Joe Parslow

PRIZES

Bryony White

Returning to the Scene of the Crime: Gendered and Racialised Violence in Ana Mendieta’s Rape Scene (1973)

The essay provides a thorough and nuanced reading of how Ana Mendieta’s The Rape Scene engages with the racializing and gendered logics of legal redress in the relation to sexual violence. While much has been written on this performance, this article is notable for its careful attention to trauma and affect, drawing on theories of forensics, re-enactment, and queer of colour critique. It is an exemplary performance analysis, one that is novel for its revisionary claims and sustained commitments to tying together debates around (mis)recognition in both performance and law. The essay’s focus on Mendieta’s important performance aids to foreground experiences and perspectives of Latinx artists in histories of performance art. This is an intricate and erudite piece that, among other things, provides a teachable resource for discussing a very difficult work and demonstrates how scholars can engage ethically and politically with art having to do with histories of racialised sexual violence. The tone of the argument – often raising the questions that cannot be answered but that are key for understanding the work’s power – resonates with Mendieta’s piece in asking of the twenty-first century reader important (yet unanswerable) questions about spectatorship and complicity in the face of acts of (gendered, racialised, sexual, patriarchal or state) violence. The focus on the effectiveness of cruelty as an aesthetic and political strategy is a further strong intervention in discourses surrounding the use of trigger warnings.

Dionysia Bouzioti

Medea Inside

Emma McDowell

Mixing Methods in Audience Research Practice: A Multi-method(ological) Discussion

Ella Parry-Davies

Immigration Infrastructure Theatricalised in Illegalised and The Claim, Contemporary Theatre Review, 31:4, pp.409–421.

The essay makes a strong argument for the unique and urgent contribution of theatre and performance research to wider systems of knowledge about the world. It articulates the perils of narratives which amplify victimhood and philanthropy and makes a strong case for revealing the mechanisms through which infrastructures performatively enact their processes emphasising the fallibility of the humans performing those processes. The author convincingly argues that performance is uniquely placed to challenge the invisibility of such infrastructure. The politics of the piece are not gestural – the article works through the performance and real-world processes in remarkable detail.

MAKE A