Performing Space 2023: Introduction

Abstract

Performing Space is an ambitious project that aims to explore the relationship between performance and the built environment from all disciplines that study human activity. Using Erving Goffman's (1956) definition in his influential essay The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life as “an action carried out by a participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way in any of the other participants” (p. 8), we could consider that any activity that people perform with the conscious or (usually) unconscious intention of “influencing” their social, but also spatial, environment is a “performance”. Our performances influence our environment, transform it, and the environment also influences and transforms us. So, we can deduce the daily activities or rituals of an ancient people from the remains of their environment, and we can also improve the performances of our society by optimising the environment in which they take place. Traditionally, the relationship between space and performance has been studied within the practices and studies of the performing arts. It is only in recent decades that other disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, architecture, archaeology or cognitive science have become interested in this relationship, but in an isolated way, usually ignoring all the resources that the performing arts have to offer. The study of the relationship between performance and space can only be approached in a multidisciplinary way. The main objective of Performing Space is to create a meeting point where studies from different disciplines can be presented, experimented with and discussed. The Performing Space 2023 Conference and Workshop, held in Nafplio, Greece, from 7 to 14 July 2023, was the second edition of this project. It was organised by the University of the Peloponnese together with the Polytechnic University of Madrid and hosted by the University of the Peloponnese. This second edition had 36 papers and 12 workshop participants from more than 10 different countries.