Assembling Wonder: Introduction to themed edition

The essays brought together in this collection explore the capacity performance art holds to move its viewers: to make us see anew. This collection is intended to take the reader on a journey through experiences of different kinds of wonder. Assembled along a register that ranges from wonder as questioning, as curiosity and asking otherwise (‘I wonder if…’), to experiencing a state of wonder in which experience effects awe, in which we are moved, the papers assembled here illustrate performance and the performative nature of art as aesthetic technologies that provoke question and “enable the world to surprise us, however gently” (Coleman and Ringrose, 2013:20). The wondering begins with questioning – with what if things were otherwise?