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DCA Award Winners

2011 (PSi#17)

Full Dwight Conquergood Awards were given to:

Matt Yoxall, National University of Singapore

Title: “Hand, Head, and Heart: Some Tools to Remember With – Theatre, the body, and organising memories in refugee resettlement on the Thai-Burma border”
Summary: “This paper considers how the body functions as a resource for navigating and situating memories in addressing feelings of disorientation, dislocation, and pending cultural adaptation within the context of a refugee resettlement theatre project. I raise the questions; to what degree are the staging of these memories representing an ideal?  Is this ideal formed solely to serve refugees, or is it also influenced by the agendas of other stakeholders in the resettlement process?”

 

Dominika Laster, NYU

presents one paper and participates in the  roundtable discussion on the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards.

Paper: Memory of Essence:  Body memory in the Grotowski work

This paper is a critical analysis of the notions and practices of body-memory as understood and deployed by performance researcher Jerzy Grotowski.  While Grotowski approached work with memory – which in his practice necessarily implied body-memory – in a variety of ways, memory functioned, at least in part, as a mode of inquiry, an instrument for rediscovery of essence.  This process of accessing forgotten human potentialities, the surpassing and realization of the self lead to, what in the early phases of research Grotowski called, a state of transparency and luminosity and later referred to as a body of essence.

Roundtable: “I-I:”  Relationality and Twinship in Grotowski’s Work

This presentation examines the work of Jerzy Grotowski as a conscious attempt to blur the boundaries of the self and other and considers the ways in which this praxis is being developed in the present research of the Workcenter.  It is this conscious, deliberate and literal unsettling of the boundaries between the self and other, which holds the most radical social, political and theoretical implications for performance studies and related fields.

Free registration was awarded to: Ana Bigotte Viera, University Nova de Lisboa.

Title: “On Acarte – methodological problems in dealing both with the archive and the repertoire”
Summary: “Revisiting the Gulbenkian Foundation´s Modern Art Center´s Department of Artistic Creation and Art Education (ACARTE) means both to question the development of Portuguese performing arts and to examine the construction of Portugal as a modern and European country.As its archives were never catalogued and there is almost no historiography on the subject, this assignment becomes a matter of dealing with both remembrances and documents, of taking into consideration archival and reportorial knowledge. But it is also a matter of choice: choosing who and how to interview, which events and which kinds of documents to take into account.In this paper, using as case study the first edition of Acarte Meetings in 1987, I would like to discuss some of the methodological challenges that one endeavour of this kind can present”.


2010 (PSi#16)
Full Dwight Conquergood Awards were given to:
Melissa Geppert, University of Minnesota, ‘A Model Slum: Global Exhibition and NGOification of Projeto Morrinho‘

Jazmin Llana, Aberystwyth University, ”Pilgrimage as Utopian Performative for a Post-colonial Counterpublic’

 

2009 (PSi#15)

Full Dwight Conquergood Awards were given to:

Rivka Eisner, National University of Singapore, ‘Remembering Revolutionary Masquerade: Performing Insurgency and the Ambivalent Pleasures of Colonial (Tres)Passing in Wartime Vietnam’

Sarah Espi-Sanchiz, University of Cape Town, ‘Cultural Regeneration and Cultural Gate-Keeping: the Case of the Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona’

Free registrations were awarded to: Tanja Ostojic, Violeta Luna, Barnaby King

2008 (PSi #14)

The winners of the Dwight Conquergood award for 2008 were Rebecca Caines, an emerging scholar from Australia and based in Belfast and Farah Yeganeh and Masoud Nourmohammadian, Activist-artists from Iran.

In her statement to the judges Rebecca writes, ‘Dwight Conquergood left a legacy of community activism and academic rigour that is both inspiring and difficult to live up to. It is a legacy that inspires me, as a young researcher, to continue to aim for new critical tropes and new ways of working with community politics. I strongly believe that community-based performance needs more international critical scholarship and academic partnership.’

In their letter of application, Farah and Masoud write, ‘Our papers, which concern a community excluded from the dominant Globalised agenda and ideology, aim to familiarize other voices, world views, value systems and beliefs with the Iranian community in order that a conversation can be established between this culture and the world. By attending, we make grounds for a kind of interregnum: possibilities about bridging disciplinary frames, cultures and politics between Iran and wider contexts of Performance Studies in the West.’