EXCELLENT GRANT COMPETITION SUPPORTED 8 DOCTORAL PROJECTS OF EXCELLENT RESEARCH

From October 2020 to June 2023, the project Enhancing the Quality of Grant Schemes at AMU, co-financed by the European Union under the Operational Programme Research, Development and Education under the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, was successfully implemented at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Thanks to this project, a new school-wide Excellent grant competition for AMU PhD students could be announced. The Rector's Decree No. 5/2021 established new, specific rules for this competition: the applicants submitted their projects in English, the applications were evaluated in two rounds, first by two external evaluators and then by the seven-member Evaluation Committee, before which the applicants had to personally present and defend their project in English.

During the three calls, a total of 28 PhD students from all three faculties submitted project applications, and the Evaluation Committee selected and approved 8 of them for support. The projects lasted between 6 and 12 months, and a total of CZK 3 178 861 was allocated for their implementation.

The focus of the projects was very diverse, demonstrating both the breadth of the traditional professional interests of AMU PhD students and the increasingly frequent shift towards content and methodological interdisciplinarity and especially towards topical and socially relevant topics. They dealt with the development of a new methodology of teaching object theatre, the elaboration of relaxation techniques for musical performers, time-lapse documentaries and so-called infra-objective stories, the use of virtual reality in contemporary scenography, the comparison and integration of the body techniques of J. Lecoq and V. Meyerchold, the specific performativity of civic assemblies, the aesthetic and ethical potential of the so-called theatre of care (performing care) or the problem of revealing the gesture of filmmaking in experimental film. The students worked with a mentor or mentee of their choice.

An obligatory aspect of the project implementation was the completion of a foreign internship, the recommended length of which depended on the length of the project implementation. The students spent from 14 to 52 days (304 days in total) on their research stays abroad and visited the following countries: France, Serbia, Poland, Slovakia, Germany, Slovenia, Italy, Finland, Switzerland, Belgium and Sweden.
A very beneficial part of the project was the creation of new non-discipline specific courses. The courses were designed not only for the supported PhD students, but also for other interested students from bachelor, master and doctoral programmes; some of them were attended by AMU staff as well. Prior to submitting their project application, students could attend the course „Preparing a Grant Application“, other courses were „Implementation of a Grant Project“, „Artistic Research Strategy, Artistic Research Methods“ and the course „Who Would be Afraid of the Information Register?

At the end of the implementation of their projects, the researchers again presented the results in person to the Evaluation Committee, and many took advantage of other opportunities to present them to the academic community, e.g. at the Doctoral Club of the Centre for Doctoral Studies of the Academy of Performing Arts or at the Territory of Art Doctoral Conference.

"I consider three aspects of the project to be absolutely crucial: Firstly, the fact that neither the project applications nor the final reports on implementation were dealt with only on paper, so to speak, but in both cases were discussed by the student and the evaluation committee; secondly, the school-wide dimension of the competition, where even the composition of the committee of experts from across disciplines clearly declared that artistic disciplines meet, touch and intertwine, and their separation sometimes has other than substantive or methodological reasons; and thirdly, a support scheme whereby students were granted scholarships with a low level of administrative burden and reporting, the only thing that needed to be documented being responsibly and credibly formulated interim reports on the implementation process. And then, of course, the promised outputs. I think it was a project built on trust, freedom and responsibility", said Daniela Jobertová, the project's expert guarantor.

The project "Improving the Quality of Grant Schemes at AMU" was co-financed by the European Union under the Operational Programme Research, Development and Education under the reg. number CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/19_073/0016938.