The annual Ruby Awards are named after late arts patron Dame Ruby Litchfield and encompass events, festival works, shows and individual achievements, with more than 90 nominations received this year across eleven categories.
Premier Peter Malinauskas presented the Premier’s Award for Lifetime Achievement to the families of joint winners – the late Hossein Valamanesh and the late Robert Jesser.
Individual Ruby Award winners included award-winning emerging playwright, performer, composer and producer Jamie Hornsby, who was awarded the Frank Ford Memorial Young Achiever Award; inspirational dancer, teacher, actor and Community Cultural Development leader Lisa Lanzi, who received the Geoff Crowhurst Memorial Award, and broadcaster, creative director, event organiser and youth advocate Dre Ngatokorua, recipient of the Stevie Gadlabarti Goldsmith Memorial Award.
Arts Minister Andrea Michaels presented Guildhouse – South Australia’s peak body for visual arts, craft and design, and a respected leader in the sector – with the award for Outstanding Contribution by an Organisation or Group.
|
|
|
The 2022 Ruby Awards winners are...
Outstanding Community Event or Project
The U City Art Project - An Encounter of Strangers – Uniting Communities and Guildhouse
U-City is a vibrant, integrated and thriving community that brings together residential, social, commercial and community services in the heart of the city. Community Artist-in-Residence, Claire Wildish, works alongside this diverse community creating an innovative, flexible and inclusive arts hub, and a safe environment where the community comes to meet and share in support, conversation and art. The project is a collaboration between Uniting Communities and Guildhouse.
***
Outstanding Regional Event or Project
No Limits: Regional Young Writers – Writers SA
Based in three regional locations (Riverland, Eyre Peninsula and Limestone Coast) and led by regionally based professionals, this project supports literary activities in the regions and creates industry pathways for young regional writers, from skills development to publication.
***
Outstanding Work, Event or Project for Young People
Seven Little Wonders – The PaperBoats
Seven Little Wonders is a poetic, non-verbal, visual-theatre performance for 3 – 8 year olds. This immersive and interactive production was devised over a 2-year period in Mt Gambier with local professional theatre-makers Gavin Clarke, Sarah Brokensha and Anya McKee working alongside The PaperBoats conceptualist and director Dave Brown, production manager, Bob Weatherly and local technical supervisor Faye Cakebread.
***
Outstanding Work or Event Outside a Festival
Bee-Stung Lips - Barbara Hanrahan, works on paper, 1960 - 1991 – Flinders University Museum of Art
A major exhibition that surveys the 30-year printmaking career of an important and prolific South Australian artist and ensures that Barbara Hanrahan’s work is admired and celebrated by a whole new audience. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue published by Wakefield Press. The exhibition is now on tour with the assistance of Country Arts South Australia.
***
Outstanding Work or Event Within a Festival
Watershed: The Death of Dr. Duncan – Adelaide Festival
This production was a unique joint commission between Adelaide Festival, Feast Festival and State Opera South Australia depicting the infamous drowning of Dr George Ian Ogilvie Duncan, a moment in time that triggered an alleged police cover-up, a Scotland Yard investigation and pioneered gay law reform in South Australia. Directed by Neil Armfield, libretto by Alana Valentine and Christos Tsiolkas, composer Joseph Twist, joined by Adelaide Chamber Singers, and choreography by Lewis Major.
***
Outstanding Collaboration
Clock for No Time – Preserving Jars Creative Collective (with simplylateral productions, Mark Oakley, Bianka Kennedy, House of Sand, RUMPUS Theatre, Appifany Pty Ltd, SA Museums - Community Programs, State Theatre of SA, Access2Arts, Deaf Can:Do, Royal Society for the Blind, Accessible Arts, Dementia Australia, Replay Creative, Autism Spectrum Australia, Hampstead Specialist Brain Rehab Services, Eliza Lovell, Australian Network of Art and Technology, Watershed)
Clock For No Time by Michèle Saint-Yves, presented by RUMPUS Theatre, was used to develop and trial a Theatre Access App prototype to deepen deaf and/or disabled, neurodivergent and dementia-living audience’s engagement with live performance, with the view to make this widely available to other theatre groups and performance groups.
***
Outstanding Contribution by an Organisation or Group
Guildhouse
Guildhouse has been South Australia’s peak body for visual arts, craft and design, and a respected leader in the sector since its inception as the Craft Association of South Australian in 1966. Guildhouse supports their artist membership through professional development, advocacy, and cross-sectoral partnerships.
***
|
|
|
Geoff Crowhurst Memorial Award 2022
Lisa Lanzi
For over 3 decades Lisa Lanzi has worked consistently in Community Cultural Development, alongside her professional career as dancer, teacher, and actor. Living with disability since birth, she has three tertiary qualifications (visual arts, dance, theatre) and with intelligence, empathy, and talent has drawn inspiration from all. Her approach to CCD is personalised, relevant, original and dedicated. Lisa has created, co-created, and directed an enormous number of diverse and original community arts projects for a range of community demographics including rural and regional, youth, homeless women, dementia-specific work, people affected by domestic violence, incarcerated women and the general community.
Frank Ford Memorial Young Achiever Award 2022
Jamie Hornsby
Jamie Hornsby is an exceptional and award-winning emerging playwright, performer, composer and producer, achieving major career success on a local, national and international level. As a fiercely original thinker, Jamie’s work is varied and always exceptional, as in his career he seamlessly moves between gritty contemporary playwriting, beautiful and tender theatre for young audiences, music theatre, devised clown work, and everything in between.
Stevie Gadlabarti Goldsmith Memorial Award 2022
Dre Ngatokorua
Dre Ngatokorua is a broadcaster, creative director, event organiser and youth advocate based in Port Augusta. Still only 25 years of age, Dre is a respected member of his community, being an important role model for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal youth. As well as his arts practice, Dre is often called upon as an inspirational speaker to ensure young people can be the very best they can be. Using music to get his message across, Dre’s Aboriginal culture underlies everything he does.
Premier’s Award for Lifetime Achievement
Robert Jesser
Robert Jesser, who sadly passed away earlier this year, started his working life in the behind the scenes technical side of theatre at the Festival Theatre and ended at the Odeon Theatre in Norwood. During this time, Bob found his niche in the provision of education and training of young people in Technical Theatre Production. With great humour, patience, persistence, and integrity, Bob taught the technical skills of production as well as the traditions, principles, practices, professional attitudes and habits of mind that he regarded as essential to be a complete theatre worker. It takes a special kind of person to dedicate their professional life to helping other people’s dreams, artistic visions and creations come to life.
Premier’s Award for Lifetime Achievement
Hossein Valamanesh
In another tragic loss to the sector this year, Hossein Valamanesh passed away suddenly earlier this year. Drawing on the cultural and natural worlds of his birthplace and his adoptive home of Australia, Hossein explored, through his work, notions of an essential connection to place, the nature of being, and the ephemeral nature of existence. He believed in art’s inclusive, transformative and even ritual power and his is practice embraced sculpture, text, photography, installation, architecture, large-scale public art and moving image. He presented more than thirty solo exhibitions around the world and his work is held in many significant collections and galleries in Australia and internationally. In 2011 he became a member of the Order of Australia ‘for service to the visual arts, particularly as a sculptor and through installation works and public art’.
|
|
See all the photos from the night in the flickr gallery and on social media with the hashtag #rubyawards22.
For all shortlisted nominees for 2022, previous year's winners and information about the Ruby Awards visit arts.sa.gov.au/rubys.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
