The symposium »Spaces of Identity in the Performing Sphere« is a part of the multi-annual project Discursive Identity in the Performing Arts: Bodies, Personae, Intersubjects whose main aim is the founding of a New Theatrologycal, interdisciplinary field of research.

Unlike traditional theatrology, as a primarily academic discipline and its particular scientific interests, New Theatrology is conceptualized as a performance systems theory, i.e. as a general systems theory applied to the field of performance theories with specific application to the performing arts. It makes a research adventure in transgressing the boundaries of arts and sciences, as well as boundaries between discourses and performances.

Within that scope, the highlighted topics are the following: discursive formation of identity, interactions between identities and physical world, generative processes of social, temporal and discursive relational spaces, including an insight into cyberspace and transhuman performing spaces.  Insights from other non-theatrological disciplines, such as philosophy, sociology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience, serve as an appropriate interpretative tool for dealing with these issues. Approaching performing artists’ self-reflection as an equal value epistemological perspective is of great importance to our project.

We hope our symposium lays the theoretical foundation stone for the outlined research field based on long-term cooperation between top experts in their respective fields. Counting on international scholars in the field of theatre studies, ethnotheatrology, sociology, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, neurology, as well as on performing artists, we hope for the possibility to test current insights from a range of different scholarly disciplines and production practices in the light of the new-theatrological paradigm.

Our conference is among the world’s first symposiums of this kind. The presented papers are going to be published in the next stage of our project (2010-2011) .Considering this, the symposium is planned to be an unavoidable starting point for the new discipline in the international context.