Announcing the winner of the third
LESLIE SCALAPINO AWARD
FOR INNOVATIVE WOMEN PERFORMANCE WRITERS
The Triumph of Crowds
by Brigid McLeer
The award will presented, with a reading of the play directed by Fiona Templeton, on Monday, December 5th at 8:00pm at the New Ohio Theatre, 154 Christopher Street, New York NY 10014
In our third round of the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers, we have chosen a work that is again very different to its predecessors.
The Triumph of Crowds is a layered work, weaving art history, film, and the contemporary politics and poetics of community. It opens up the space of performance into a time that is both meditative and urgent.
Brigid writes: The Triumph of Crowds is a lecture as performance, or performance as lecture, distributed between the voices and gestures of ten performers. Written in response to Nicholas Poussin’s painting ‘The Triumph of David’ (1631) it explores the politics of public assembly, protest, and becoming ‘us’.
Brigid McLeer is Irish living in the UK. She has been working and exhibiting mainly in visual art and installation, as well as performance and writing.
Finalists:
Lisa Langford, The Art of Longing
Jamara Wakefield, Rosie
Semi-finalists:
Kelly Malone, Reign of Contexti
Ish Klein, Orchids
Michelle Sui, house/body
Our final rounds were highly competitive and we plan further presentations to introduce this year’s finalists.
In memory of Leslie Scalapino, her extraordinary body of work, and her commitment to the community of experimental writing and performance.
Announcing the winner of the second
LESLIE SCALAPINO AWARD
FOR INNOVATIVE WOMEN PERFORMANCE WRITERS
Non-Sequitur
by Khadijah Queen
The award will presented, with a reading of the play directed by Fiona Templeton, on Monday, November 17th at 8:00pm at the New Ohio Theatre, 154 Christopher Street, New York NY 10014
The Relationship is thrilled to announce another fabulous winner of the Award, for 2014. The judges were unanimous in selecting Khadijah’s play, Non-Sequitur. We found it experimental in conception, language and performance approach, and by turns hilarious and moving.
Khadijah writes: NON-SEQUITUR concerns a large group of abstract/conceptual characters and objects carrying on apparently unrelated conversations and making various observations about the larger world. The play explores the relationship between body and text/speech, how the body mediates thought, feeling and perception, enacting unconscious drives and performing /interacting with stereotypes in absurd, unexpected ways.Uninhibitedly funny and raucously sharp, NON-SEQUITUR invites the audience to fill in the considerable gaps between rhetoric and truth, creating a space for them to draw their own conclusions and trust their own instincts regarding the play’s wild demonstrations of the ridiculousness and pervasiveness of bias.
Khadijah Queen is the author of two poetry collections: Conduit (2008) and Black Peculiar (2011). Individual poems and essays appear in jubilat, Aufgabe, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Rattle, The Force of What’s Possible and widely elsewhere. She is a Cave Canem alum and curates the multigenre reading series, Courting Risk.
SHORT LIST
Catherine Cafferty | Perpetua Takes a Backseat
Maxe Crandall | Together Men Make Paradigms
Dipika Guha | PASSING
Laryssa Husiak | THE FORGETTABLE SAGA OF DONNA WANNA
Adeena Karasick | Salome: Woman of Valor
Karinne Syers | The Lydian Gale Parr
Catherine Theis | Medea
Mfoniso Udofia | runboyrun
We once again thoroughly enjoyed our reading experience of the hundreds of entries. We were so impressed with our short list that we are announcing the whole list of nine works rather than a couple of runners-up.
In memory of Leslie Scalapino, her extraordinary body of work, and her commitment to the community of experimental writing and performance.
THE AWARD
The Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers, administered by The Relationship, recognizes the importance of exploratory approaches and an innovative spirit in writing for performance. It wishes to encourage women writers who are taking risks with the playwriting form by offering the opportunity to gain wider exposure through readings and productions. The award also seeks to increase public awareness for this vibrant contemporary field. We are looking for a full-length work for live performance by a woman writer with an inquiring approach to language and content.
The Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers intends to support new writing by female-identified people, inclusive of transwomen.
In addition to the reading at the The New Ohio Theatre in New York – by Fiona Templeton’s company, The Relationship – the winner will receive a cash prize and print publication of winning play by Litmus Press. And from this round on, the award will be biennial, with the winning play also receiving full production in the following year. Details will be announced on the Relationship website and via email next year.
The first winner of the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers (previously Playwrights) was Joyelle McSweeney’s Dead Youth, or, the Leaks, published by Litmus Press in November 2014. Runners up included Angela Rawlings and Hannah Silva. The second winner was Khadijah Queen’s Non-Sequitur, published by Litmus Press in 2015.
The Leslie Scalapino Award recognizes the importance of exploratory approaches and an innovative spirit in writing for performance. It wishes to encourage women writers who are taking risks with the playwriting form by offering the opportunity to gain wider exposure through readings and productions. The award also seeks to increase public awareness for this vibrant contemporary field.
The next call for entries will be in 2018.
The Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Playwrights is funded in part by the Leslie Scalapino–O Books Fund and is administered by The Relationship. Publication of award-winning works will be in collaboration with Litmus Press.