THERE'S a place just off Edinburgh's Royal Mile which the chances of you or I ever having been invited inside are pretty slim.

By all accounts, the select few who have graced the doors of occasional functions at this residential address a stone’s throw from Holyrood are shaping future intellectual thought. Inspired by ideas of 18th century salons, in which the latest ideas on philosophy, science and art were debated in a lively social environment, this 21st century Edinburgh model is an example of a new wave of salons.

Here enlightened thinkers can talk freely in a way in which the democratically elected members along the road either can’t, won’t, or are simply not clever enough to engage in such a discourse.

In his glass-windowed office in Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, peering over a scaled-down model of the theatre’s main stage, theatre director, designer and current Traverse artist in residence Stewart Laing appears as far away from such rarefied gatherings as one can imagine. As instigator of The Salon Project, a very public piece of participatory spectacle in which the audience are required to dress up in an allotted costume as some of the great minds of our generation hold court, perhaps we should think again.

All this is represented in miniature inside Laing’s model by a huddle of plastic figurines tucked into a corner gathered around a doll’s-house size pianola. Peering over this approximation of Traverse 1 with its banks of seating removed, and with a false ceiling masking the space’s vertical expanse, Laing is struggling for words.

“It’s 360 degrees,” he says of the space, “which is a two-dimensional expression, but I don’t know what the word is for something that’s 360 degrees in both directions. I’ve been asking people, but nobody seems to know.”

Perhaps this is something one of the eminent scholars invited to take part in a rolling programme will be able to shed light on. In the meantime, Laing’s own thinking behind The Salon Project is also worth dissecting.

“We’re going to be presenting provocations for conversation,” he says. “That seems to be the historical function of the salon. It’s all about conversation. So in a lot of ways I feel more like a curator than a director, because in terms of any kind of dramatic arc, it’s quite low. There’ll be different people on every evening, and there’s nothing there that I can control in terms of what happens.”

As one might expect from Laing’s ongoing fascination with left-field literary icons, from Verlaine and Rimbaud through to Jean Cocteau, The Salon Project has similarly fan-boy roots.

As Laing explains, “There was a performance piece I’d read about. The text was by Proust and the music was by (Venezuelan composer) Reynaldo Hahn, and just because I have an interest in both those artists, I thought it was an extraordinary thing that they’d collaborated, especially at a live event, and especially because I had no knowledge of Proust ever having done any dramatic writing.

“It was a piece called Portraits of Painters, that they performed together at a salon in Paris in 1895, and while I was trying to track it down, I had this idea that it might be interesting to present it in the same circumstances, with the audience dressed in period costume.

“Everyone I spoke to about it, all my collaborators, got very excited about this idea, but when I eventually tracked down the piece it turned out to be really dull.”

Even so, the idea stuck with Laing, who pulled together a group of like-minded artists, musicians and performers. As it stands, a company of roughly 20 will be made up of a mix of speakers and guides to allow the audience of 60 to navigate the space once split up into six groups of 10. At the heart of an evening performance, artist Rose English, who famously appeared onstage at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre with a performing horse, will hold court.

Laing also approached artists Robbie Thomson and Jack Wrigley. Part of the 85A artists collective in Glasgow and graduates of Glasgow School of Art’s environmental art course, the pair impressed Laing with a piece about a Polish submarine that utilised live soundtracks to silent movies in a space that recreated the submarine out of cardboard.

“It was one of the most exciting things I’d seen in Glasgow in years,” Laing gushes.

The Salon Project itself sounds part intellectual speed-dating, part art-cabaret like the original Cabaret Voltaire nightclub at which early Dadaists did turns in a Swiss nightclub.

“A lot of people have mentioned cabaret,” Laing concedes, “but I see the idea of the salon as pre-cabaret. I always think of cabaret as a sort of alternative or underground form of entertainment, but I think there’s something interesting about these aristocratic salons, because there was this idea of exclusivity about them. You could only go if you were invited, and there was no other means of entry. It was a small group of people, making art, music and poetry for themselves and their friends. So I think it’s about exploding that idea of exclusivity is what I’m interested in.”

But isn’t that sense of exclusivity half the appeal? The idea of your name not being down on the guest list, after all, is what made the likes of Studio 54 in the 1970s or The Groucho Club in the 1980s so legendary. Yet if The Salon Project is a way of opening things up in terms of discourse, Laing remains in charge. “It’s an aesthetically controlled event,” he says.

Laing’s ever-changing exercise in mind expansion forms something of a centre-piece in what looks like an odd-shaped autumn season at the Traverse that puts ideas at its heart. As well as The Salon Project, Traverse Resident Playwright Peter Arnott is spending his year long-term in association with the Edinburgh University based Economics and Social Research Council’s Genomics Forum hosting a series of informal talks on his work. For those who may be unfamiliar with the term, genomics is a genetics-based discipline based around determining the DNA structures of living organisms. Arnott’s recent events have included Whose View of Life? ... Or Men and Monkeys Revisited, with conversation-based workshops on Translating The Genome forthcoming.

Additionally, the next full Traverse production will be The Tree of Knowledge, a new play by Jo Clifford which transports philosopher David Hume and economist Adam Smith to 21st century Edinburgh. So, what, then, is the big idea? Why are such public and private forums for discussion becoming so prevalent beyond the hallowed halls of parliaments and other, more formally inclined institutions?

“I think the idea of sharing ideas is very attractive, and especially of sharing ideas in a social situation. A lot of the original salons were very politically motivated, and I think that’s the case with a lot of the ones that exist today as well. There’s a balance there between sharing ideas and partying, and I think people are looking for something like that again, which is partly why there’s so much participatory theatre going on just now. But I just want to allow people to think. That’s really what I want to do, so the conversation goes beyond what was on telly last night. I just want people to think ahead.”

The Salon Project, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, October 10-22. Visit www.traverse.co.uk, www.untitledprojects.co.uk.