Wunderkammer: the performance showcase as critical performative pedagogy

ABSTRACT

The performance showcase is a rich opportunity to employ critical performative pedagogy as an embodied engagement with, interrogation of, and disruption to institutional and ideological structures and practices. Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities): A Performance Showcase radically actualizes critical performative pedagogy by attending to, collecting, and curating the embodied labor of the performance classroom and curriculum. We include a descriptive account of Wunderkammer that invites you, the reader, to imagine and experience a version of the showcase, and that emphasizes our process and choices as curators.

KEYWORDS:

• Wunderkammer
• cabinet of curiosities
• performance showcase
• wonder
• critical performative pedagogy

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the curators who helped stage the performance showcase described in this essay: Adolfo Lagomasino, Christina Magalona, Marquese McFerguson, Sasha Sanders, and Liahnna Stanley. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Aubrey A. Huber http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6985-0156

Chris McRae http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5268-3240

Notes

1. These descriptive accounts of the performance installation are unique to this event. However, this practice of narrating possible experiential encounters with performance installation follows the form of narrating and describing performance installations as a theoretical feature of creating and staging performance work. For example, Joni L. Jones narrates an account of the ways audience members were invited to engage and move through her performance installation, “Searching for Osun,” in her discussion of the theoretical implications of the event (1–7). Similarly, Shauna M. MacDonald offers a descriptive reflection of the experience of her performance ethnography installation as part of the performance and research process (39).

2. Like Ruth Bowman's description of the excessive collection of artifacts inside the Barn at the LSU Rural Life Museum, “there does not appear to be a savvy curator who arranges the parts” (184).

3. The projected videos feature the work from a class assignment based on the call made by Lyndsay Michalik Gratch for sweded films, or re-makes of popular music with limited resources. These videos embrace what Michalik Gratch refers to as “amateur aesthetics” (113). She explains:

Sweded movies show us that if you want to make something, you don't need money, cutting-edge technology, a lot of time, or even experience. What you need is creative and crafty thinking, a bit of planning, a willingness to play, and a couple of co-creators. Most importantly, you must accept in advance that your sweded movie will probably not be very “good.” But it will be, and ideally, it will be watched, shared, discussed, critiqued, and possibly even celebrated. (113)

In many ways, the entire performance installation also enacts an amateur aesthetics that is centrally concerned with the process of creating, experimenting, and play.