Friends of the Hocken Collections Award 2023.

By Hocken Collections | Posted:

We are delighted to share that Dr Emily Duncan is the recipient of the Friends of the Hocken Collections Award 2023.

Dr Duncan’s project for the award, 'Establishment', will comprise research, writing, a workshop, and a live reading presentation of a series of monologues about dining establishments that operated in Dunedin between the late 1920s to the mid-2010s.

'Establishment' is a mode of investigating and presenting these venues and the people who dined and worked there as aninterlinked series of short dramatic monologues accompanied by projections of photographic images and related archives held in the Hocken Collections, alongside music representing the era of each piece. The establishments will range from high dining and special occasion restaurants such as Café Vedic on Princes Street (1928-64) to the more informal, as was Big Daddy’s in the Octagon (1971-94). 

In her writing and research, Dr Duncan will apply a combination of the dramaturgical methodology from her PhD research (Waipiata: A Practice-Led Exploration of Heterotopic Playwriting; https://bit.ly/3RNueEn) and play script development processes she has employed as a writer and dramaturg over the past five years with institutions and organisations including Toitū Otago Settlers Museum and Ōtepoti Theatre Lab.