Hear ye, hear ye! Calling all performers, directors, and audiences of performance. The Performance Wunderkammer: A Cabinet of Curiosities is a recurring series housed on Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies. This series seeks to include the ephemera, remains, and leftovers of staged performances and performance installations.‡

This recurring series seeks to curate artifacts of performance that index and reveal the effects and affects of the labor and processes of creating and staging performance and performance installations. This may include, but is not limited to assorted objects of performance (props, costumes, scenery, etc.); fragments of performance materials (notes, scripts, programs, schedules, e-mail exchanges, proposals, receipts, etc.); assemblages of the ephemera and remains of performance production (coffee cups, sawdust, takeout menus, pencil shavings, sweat, tears, etc.). This exhibit may also include emergent and generative curiosities created during and following performances (reflections, poetry, cartoons, news clippings, text messages, etc.)

Submissions should include a title and brief description of the artifact. The title and description may or may not include the following: an interpretation of the object, a direct link to the performance the artifact indexes, a date the artifact was found, the date of the performance referenced. The curiosities may be documented in a variety of forms including but not limited to pictures, video clips, audio clips, written fragments, and accounts.

Fully curated exhibits with multiple submissions to be housed in this space are welcomed. These may include artifacts from multiple performances. For example, this could include a curated collection of artifacts from a full season of performances; a selection of artifacts from a particular performance space over a longer period of time; or artifacts from an oeuvre of a particular performer.

‡ see for example:

Huber, Aubrey and Chris McRae. "Wunderkammer: The Performance Showcase as Critical Performative Pedagogy." Text and Performance Quarterly, 39.3 (2019): 285-304.

Mak, Bonnie and Julia Pollack. "The Performance and Practice of Research in A Cabinet of Curiosity: The Library's Dead Time." Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 32.2 (2013): 202-221.

Robertson, Bruce and Mark Meadow. "Microcosms: Objects of Knowledge." AI & Society 14 (2000): 223-229.

Sheehy, Colleen J. "A Walrus Head in the Art Museum: Mark Dion Digs into the University of Minnesota." Cabinet of Curiosities: Mark Dion and the University as Installation. Ed. Colleen J. Sheehy. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2006. 3-28.



Please direct inquiries about the Performance Wunderkammer series to:

Chris McRae, Ph.D. (cjmcrae@usf.edu)
Associate Professor
Department of Communication
University of South Florida

The Performance Wunderkammer contributions will be published in all issues (if accepted work is available) as a regular section of Liminalities.