Congratulations to Associate Professor Ana Paula Höfling who was awarded the Dance Studies Association’s Oscar G. Brockett Prize for Dance Research for her book Staging Brazil: Choreographies of Capoeira (Wesleyan University Press, 2019). The award is funded by the Oscar G. Brockett Center for Theatre History and Criticism at the University of Texas Austin, and honors Professor Brockett and advances its mission of recognizing the finest scholarship in theatre, dance, and performance history.
The 2021 award was made with this citation: “With its rich interweaving of history, cultural context, archival research, movement analysis, and ethnographic insight, Staging Brazil: Choreographies of Capoeira is a model for critical dance studies in the twenty-first century. This year’s Brockett Prize committee found this book to be beautifully written, methodologically rigorous, and theoretically sophisticated—a wonderful example of sharp postcolonial critique that is also willing to challenge conventional narratives of authenticity and origin. Höfling is a scholar who takes the time to allow ideas to ripen, producing an accessible book that synthesizes arguments across chapters and provides our field with an example of the best kind of kinesthetic literacy.”