Performing Space is an international platform dedicated to exploring the dynamic relationship between performance and space through research, artistic practice and interdisciplinary dialogue. Since its launch in 2022, it has brought together researchers, artists and practitioners from more than twenty countries, fostering exchange across architecture, performance studies, theatre, choreography, archaeology, anthropology, urban studies, landscape architecture and related fields.
Through its annual conference or symposium and an expanding international network, Performing Space promotes collaboration between theory and practice, creating opportunities for new forms of research, artistic experimentation and critical reflection on the performative dimensions of space.
Previous publications:
Performing Space 2022 (download here), Performing Space 2023 (download here), Performing Space 2024 (download here)
Performing Space 2025 (download here)
The Preferences of the Gods workshop, led by Pablo Berzal Cruz & Alba Balmaseda Domínguez. Performing Space 2026 (Photo: Spyros Kousouris)
ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM
Performing Space Symposium 2026 is organised by the Performing Space Association in collaboration with the Department of Performing and Digital Arts and the Department of Theatre Studies at the University of the Peloponnese, together with the Department of Theatre Studies' postgraduate programmes “Creative Writing, Theatre and Cultural Industries: Artistic, Research and Pedagogical Applications” and “Theatre, Education, Society.”
Bringing together researchers, artists and practitioners from around the world, the symposium explores the reciprocal relationship between performance and space through academic presentations, performances, conversations, workshops and site-based activities.
Since its first edition, Performing Space has become an international platform for dialogue across architecture, theatre, performance studies, archaeology, anthropology, urban studies, landscape architecture, scenography and related fields. The symposium encourages critical exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration and the development of new perspectives on how spatial environments shape human experience, and how performance, in turn, redefines the meaning and use of space.
By bringing together theory, artistic practice and situated experience, Performing Space creates opportunities for new collaborations across disciplines, institutions and cultures, fostering innovative approaches to understanding and engaging with the performative dimensions of space.
Non-presenting Participants
Non-presenting participants are warmly welcome to attend Performing Space Symposium 2026.
The registration fee includes access to all symposium sessions, performances, workshops and special events, as well as a Certificate of Participation.
Advance Registration
€70 (bank transfer)
To register in advance, please contact us at info@performingspace.org. We will send you the payment instructions before you complete the registration process.
Advance registration deadline: 23 August 2026
On-site Registration
€80 (cash only)
On-site registration will be available at the symposium reception desk on the first day of the event.
Registration Form:
PERFORMING SPACE 2025 PROGRAMME
2 to 5 September at Labor Center of Nafplio, 25is Martiou 6, Nafplio, Greece
You can download the full programme
2 September
Making Space
9:00 Registration
10:30 Welcome address
Invited Session I
Introduced by Athena Stourna
11:30 Yves Winkin — A Walk around the City I
12:30 Break
1st Session
Performing Spatial Practices. Chair: Philip Hager
13:00 Dimitrios Papachristos — Farewell, but Not Forever
13:10 Gabriele Leo — Curating Atmospheres: Performative Practices and Affective Alliances in the Re-Territorialization of a Sacrifice Zone
13:20 Attila Antal — Stories of the Streets - Invisible Performances in Urban Spaces
13:30 Francesca Schinzani & Marica Albanese — Embodying Protest: Disguise as a Device for Hyper-Visibility and Disidentification in Public Space
13:40 Discussion
14:00 Lunch
2nd Session
Performative Learning. Chair: Alba Balmaseda Domínguez
16:00 Dimitri Szuter — Reprendre Place: Experimenting the Ecosocial Revolution with the Halprins
16:10 Anna Luyten — Performance and Listening to Landscapes
16:20 Olav Harsløf — Space Tradition and Renewal: The Performance Design ‘Academity’
16:30 Leo Vukelić — The Space Between Prompt and Performance. Friction as a Generator of Narrative Space
16:40 Discussion
17:00 Break
3rd Session
Performative Devices. Chair: Eirini Sourgiadaki
17:10 Angeliki Bara — Inside Gaddafi’s Tent: Performing Postcolonial Diplomacy Between Kitsch and Symbolism
17:20 Asimina Tsarouchi — The Kaross in the Courtroom: Mandela’s Sartorial Performance and the Disruption of Apartheid Architecture
17:30 Gabriella Kiss — No Common Ground, Only a Shared Hill: Human–Dog Translation as a Performative Situation of Agonistic Publicness
17:40 Discussion
20:30 Akronafplia Festival: Antigone at Akronafplia
Performed by the Department of Theatre Studies, University of the Peloponnese
3 September
Performing the City
Invited Session I
Introduced by Athena Stourna
9:00 Yves Winkin — A Walk around the City II
10:00 Discussion
10:20 Break
Invited Session II
Introduced by Dorita Hannah
10:30 C. Nadia Seremetakis — SENSING THE EVERYDAY. Intervention performances in space and time
12:00 Break
4th Session
Performing Belonging Chair: Christina Zoniou
12:10 Laura Dreyer — One Horse at a Time
12:20 Argyris Angeli — Democracy on Stage
12:30 Shauna Janssen — This Space is for You: Performing Palimpsests and Atmospherics of Radical Hospitality
12:40 Eirini Sourgiadaki — Post-Spiritualities, Tourism and Contemporary Archaeologies
12:50 Georgia Kanellopoulou — Whose Space, Whose Identity? Bad Bunny and the Spatial Politics of Puerto Rico at the Super Bowl LX Halftime Show 2026
13:00 Discussion
5th Session
Performing Archaeology Chair: Maria Mikedaki
13:30 Andreas Skourtis — Performing Ancient Tenea
13:40 Konstantina Chavaki — Archaeology for and with Children: Performance as a tool for understanding the obscure archaeological world
13:50 Discussion
14:00 Lunch
6th Session
Performing Assemblies Chair: Antonia Vasilakou
16:00 Dorita Hannah & Alya Abed Ali — DIWANIYAT AL-MADINA: A Regional Urban Assembly Space Re-Spacing Assembly
16:10 Christina Zoniou — MAZI Student Arts Festivals: Performing Belonging in Public Space
16:20 Alexandros Alexiou — Live-Action Roleplaying (Larp) Festivals as Democratic Spaces
16:30 Discussion
16:50 Break
7th Session
Performing Landscape: Chair: Maria Chaniotaki
17:00 Alexandrina Fleming — Three Countries: Memory, Landscape and the Body as Archive
17:10 Elias D'hollander — Faire Écouter. The Accordance of Choreography and Architecture in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s and Radouan Mriziga’s collaboration 3ird5@w9rk
17:20 Αngela Fragkou — Witnessing as Spatial Practice: Sea Light Arc – Kythera / Observer-Dependent Phenomena
17:30 Rafaël Magrou — Emphasizing Links between Education and Research. The Full Moon Theatre Experience
17:40 Discussion
20:30 Opening Party
4 September
Memory, Power and Belonging
8th Session
Performing Ecologies. Chair: Ioanna Tzartzani
9:00 Lydia Xourafi — Somatic Notation: Mapping Posthuman Spatial Relations through Choreographic Practice
9:10 Greig Burgoyne — We are elsewhere’
9:20 David Bassuk — Spatial Narrative and Embodied Performance
9:30 Elena Stamatopoulou — From Collective Creation to Performative Ecosystems: Reimagining Space through Mycelial Practices
9:40 Discussion
10:00 Break
Invited Session III
Introduced by Pablo Berzal Cruz
10:10 Mateo Feijóo & Apostolia Papadamaki — Making Performance Space: A Conversation
11:40 Break
9th Session
Spaces of Power. Chair: Pablo Berzal Cruz
11:50 Ülfet Sevdi — Turning as Spatial Knowledge: Sema, Dynamic Embodiment, and the Performance of Sacred Space
12:00 Maria López — Space, Symbolism, and the Performance of Power: Alcázar of Segovia
12:10 Pinar Özayan — Performing the Washhouse: Seasonal Rituals and Everyday Spatial Practices in Mudurnu’s Communal Irmak Buildings
12:20 Andrei-Călin Zamfirescu — A March to the Beat of Yet Different Drummers. Contemporary Reframings of Shamanic Ceremonial Sites as Communal Performance Spaces
12:30 Burcu Bostancı & Berke Can Malkoç — Performing Community in Mudurnu Arasta
12:40 Discussion
12:50 Break
10th Session
Performing Inclusion. Chair: Athena Stourna
13:00 Tony McCaffrey — The Ends of Theatre? Disability and Performing Space
13:10—13:20 Stella Sofokleus — Between Light and Shadow: An Arts-Based Research Project with the Community 18 ANO on Strefi Hill
13:20 Discussion
14:00 Lunch
11th Session
Performing Spatialities. Chair: Maria Konomi
16:00 Paul Allain & Angeliki Varakis-Martin — When Space Puts on a Mask: Physical Theatre, Mask and the Production of Performance Space.
16:10 Paula Andrea Olmedo Latoja — Gesture Before Form: Terpsícore, the Interwoven as a Performative Condition of Space
16:20 Zeynep Tibet — Choreographing Space: Twice-Behaved Performance in Architecture
16:30 Višnja Žugić — Performative Spatialities: Between Phenomenology and Social Reality
16:40 Rodrigo Tisi — Adverse Performativity and the Fragility of Public Common Spaces
16:50 Discussion
17:20 Break
Featured Session
Introduced by Alba Balmaseda
17:30 Andrés Garcés Alzamora & Manuel Florencio Sanfuentes — Ha Lugar: The Phalëne and the Performing Space in the Valparaíso School's Seventy-Year
18:00 Phalëne Giving Place Poetry. Amereida & Open City
5 September
Reimagining Space
12th Session
Performing Memory. Chair: Athena Stourna
9:00 Jayne Thompson — Performing Commemoration: Creating Alternative Spaces
9:10 Philip Esch — Speculative Evidence: Interweaving Documentary and Speculative Choreographies
9:20 Vicky Spanovangelis — Situated Autoethnography & Ancestral Storytelling in the Locality of Nafplio
9:30 Alexia Kalogeropoulou — When the Forest Burns: Researching and Performing Eco-Trauma and Ecological Mourning
9:40 Discussion
Invited Session IV
Introduced by Dorita Hannah
10:00 Jon McKenzie
11:30 Break
13th Session
Performing Domestic Space. Chair: Visnja Žugić
11:40 Georgie Hook — Home/Bodies: Using participatory scenographic methods to explore embodied experiences of home
11:50 Bernadett Jobbágy — KITCHEN: When Space Becomes a Collaborator _ Reflections on the Shooting Process of a Short Choreographic Film
12:00 Athena Stourna — The Table as Performance Space: A New Kind of (S)Cenography?
12:10 Özlem Gezgin — Scenographic Affordances and the Emergence of Movement: A Choreographic Analysis of Spatial Agency in The Madman and the Nun
12:20 Discussion
12:30 Break
14th Session
Building Worlds: Chair: Katerina El Raheb
12:40 Pavlos Panagiotidis — Directable Scenography: Rehearsing AI-enabled Performance Spaces
12:50 Elina Roinioti & Eleana Pandia — Stages No Body Can Enter: What We Learn from AI Companions about Performative Space
13:00 Dimitris Baltas — Augmenting the Site: AR Methodologies for Site-Specific Dance
13:10 Elina Roinioti et al. — Embodying Protest: Disguise as a Device for Hyper-Visibility and Disidentification in Public Space
13:20 David Bassuk — BUILDING WORLDS, NOT STORIES
13:30 Discussion
14:00 Lunch
15th Session
Shifting Spatialities. Chair Elina Roinioti
16:00 Helen Robertson — Somewhere Between Two Movements
16:10 Yannis Mathioudakis — Reconstructing Space Through the Lens of Exile: A Case Study of ME/DEA
16:20 Nico Angiuli & Katerina El Raheb — I Was Bitten by a Robot Dog!
16:30 Discussion
16:50 Break
Invited Session V
Introduced by Maria Mikedaki
17:00 Joseph Maran — Mycenaean Citadels as Performative Space: The Case of Tiryns
17:30 Closing Roundtable — Performing Space Futures
Featured Session
19:00 Apostolia Papadamaki & Dorita Hannah. Sunset Ritual
20:00 Closing Party
6 September
Closing Session
9:00 Joseph Maran — Field Visit to Tiryns
Keynote Speakers & Invited Contributors
Joseph Maran. Professor of Pre- and Protohistory, Heidelberg University.
Keynote Lecture & Field Session
Mycenaean Citadels as Performative Space: The Case of Tiryns
Joseph Maran is Professor of Pre- and Protohistory at Heidelberg University. Since 1994, he has directed the excavations at the Mycenaean palatial centre and UNESCO World Heritage Site of Tiryns (Greece) on behalf of the German Archaeological Institute. From 2013 to 2017, he served as Director of the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context.”
His research explores transculturality, changing lifeworlds, the relationship between architecture and social practice, and the role of material culture and social memory in Copper and Bronze Age societies at the Mediterranean interface between Europe and Asia. He recently co-edited the volumes Ambivalent Times: The Mycenaean Palatial Period between Splendor and Demise (2023) and Rituals, Memory, and Societal Dynamics: Contributions to Social Archaeology (2025).
Jon McKenzie. Professor of Design | Theorist | Artist
Jon McKenzie is a theorist, designer and artist whose work explores performance across cultural, organisational and technological contexts. He is Professor of Design and founder of the DesignLab at the University of Technology Sydney, where he develops experimental approaches to design, media and performance research.
His influential books, including Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance and Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement, have shaped contemporary debates on performance, design and cultural practice. Combining theory, creative practice and collaborative experimentation, his work investigates how performance operates as a mode of inquiry, design and social transformation across disciplines.
C. Nadia Seremetakis. Professor of Anthropology | Author
Keynote Lecture
Sensing the Everyday: Intervention Performances in Space and Time
C. Nadia Seremetakis is Professor of Anthropology, an award-winning author, and one of the leading voices in the anthropology of culture, memory, and the senses. Her books and articles, written in both English and Greek, are based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in rural and urban Greece, as well as comparative research in different parts of the world. Her work has been translated into several languages and has been widely taught in the Humanities, Cultural Studies, and Fine Arts for more than two decades.
Born in Greece, she studied and taught in New York, where she lived for twenty years, before returning to Greece to teach for a decade. She continues to lecture internationally and has also designed and organised public participatory multimedia and interdisciplinary initiatives focused on regional cultural development. Her full Bio at www.seremetakis.com
Today, she divides her time between Europe and the United States.
Yves Winkin. Professor | Communication Scholar
Keynote Walk
A Walk around the City
Yves Winkin is a Belgian educator and communication scholar who synthesized several strands of American social science into the ethnographically grounded anthropology of communication, introducing this approach to the French-speaking world. He has been Professor at the University of Liège, the École normale supérieure de Lyon, and the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers in Paris. He was the founding Director of the French Institute of Education (2010–2012) and later Director of the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris (2015–2019). His most recent book, From Erving to Goffman: A Work in Performance? (mediastudies.press, 2026), explores the life and work of Erving Goffman. His forthcoming book, co-authored with Sonia Lavadinho, Micro-liens: Entretenir la ville relationnelle au quotidien (Apogée, 2027), examines everyday forms of urban sociality.
Mateo Feijóo. Artistic Director | Curator | Educator
Conversation
Making Performance Space: A Conversation
Yves Winkin is a Belgian educator and communication scholar who synthesized several strands of American social science into the ethnographically grounded anthropology of communication, introducing this approach to the French-speaking world. He has been Professor at the University of Liège, the École normale supérieure de Lyon, and the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers in Paris. He was the founding Director of the French Institute of Education (2010–2012) and later Director of the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris (2015–2019). His most recent book, From Erving to Goffman: A Work in Performance? (mediastudies.press, 2026), explores the life and work of Erving Goffman. His forthcoming book, co-authored with Sonia Lavadinho, Micro-liens: Entretenir la ville relationnelle au quotidien (Apogée, 2027), examines everyday forms of urban sociality.
Yves Winkin. Professor | Communication Scholar
Keynote Walk
A Walk around the City
Yves Winkin is a Belgian educator and communication scholar who synthesized several strands of American social science into the ethnographically grounded anthropology of communication, introducing this approach to the French-speaking world. He has been Professor at the University of Liège, the École normale supérieure de Lyon, and the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers in Paris. He was the founding Director of the French Institute of Education (2010–2012) and later Director of the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris (2015–2019). His most recent book, From Erving to Goffman: A Work in Performance? (mediastudies.press, 2026), explores the life and work of Erving Goffman. His forthcoming book, co-authored with Sonia Lavadinho, Micro-liens: Entretenir la ville relationnelle au quotidien (Apogée, 2027), examines everyday forms of urban sociality.
Yves Winkin. Professor | Communication Scholar
Keynote Walk
A Walk around the City
Yves Winkin is a Belgian educator and communication scholar who synthesized several strands of American social science into the ethnographically grounded anthropology of communication, introducing this approach to the French-speaking world. He has been Professor at the University of Liège, the École normale supérieure de Lyon, and the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers in Paris. He was the founding Director of the French Institute of Education (2010–2012) and later Director of the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris (2015–2019). His most recent book, From Erving to Goffman: A Work in Performance? (mediastudies.press, 2026), explores the life and work of Erving Goffman. His forthcoming book, co-authored with Sonia Lavadinho, Micro-liens: Entretenir la ville relationnelle au quotidien (Apogée, 2027), examines everyday forms of urban sociality.
THE 2026 SYMPOSIUM
Keynote Speakers
Performing Space Symposium 2026 is organised by the Performing Space Association in collaboration with the Department of Theatre Studies and the Department of Performing and Digital Arts at the University of the Peloponnese.
The symposium brings together researchers, artists and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines and countries to explore the relationship between performance and space through presentations, discussions, performances and site-based activities.
Performing Space aims to foster critical exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration and the consolidation of an international research network.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS & INVITED CONTRIBUTORS
Confirmed Keynote Speakers
- Jon McKenzie
- C. Nadia Seremetakis
- Yves Winkin
- Joseph Maran
Invited Contributors
- Dorita Hannah
- Mateo Feijóo
- Apostolia Papadamaki
The symposium will bring together leading researchers, artists, curators and practitioners working across performance studies, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, curatorial practice and spatial research. Additional invited contributors will be announced progressively during the coming months.
FOCUS
This edition shifts from a presentation-heavy model towards a discursive and community-oriented format, where discussion becomes a central method of research.
We invite contributions engaging with:
- performance studies and anthropology
- theatre and choreography
- architecture and spatial practices
- archaeology and social sciences
- urban studies and geography
- visual and media arts
- socially engaged and participatory practices
KEY QUESTIONS
- How can performance redefine our understanding of space today?
- What forms of spatial practice are emerging in contemporary contexts?
- How do performative actions interact with social, political and urban environments?
- What are the limits and possibilities of performance as a spatial practice?
For any questions, contact: info@performingspace.org
ORGANISED BY
Performing Space Association
University of the Peloponnese