This symposium seeks to investigate performative trajectories, without neglecting to map the histories and genealogies that inform them. It will explore the ways in which our critical tools – such as postcolonialism and interculturalism – can help us to understand a new cosmopolitan geography and the power relations it reflects. We are interested in finding the spaces where local performance, global performance, the theatre of the centre and the theatre of the margins overlap.  In analysing these spaces we hope to open up a discourse that explores contemporary conceptions of community and universality, and to develop critical schemata to deal with race, class, nationality and gender in performance.

Keynote Speakers: Peter M Boenisch, University of Kent and Silvija Jestrovic, University of Warwick.

The areas of interest for our panelists, performers and workshop coordinators might involve, but are by no means limited to:

* Global performative frameworks/networks
* The significance of cultural boundaries and national borders to performance
* Postcolonial stages
* Theatres of exchange, surrogation and/or substitution
* Tracing trajectories and accounting for histories in intercultural theatre practice
* Cosmopolitan performance
* Community theatre and globalization

Please send 300-word abstracts for papers and workshops along with a brief biography by 13 April to the conference organisers at:mappingperformance@rhul.ac.uk.

Mapping Performance will form the starting-point for the Autumn 2008 issue of Platform, a postgraduate eJournal of Theatre and Performing Arts. Conference participants and delegates are invited to submit papers for this issue: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/drama/platform/.

Conference Organizers: Emer O’Toole and Mara Lockowandt