These are the lectures notes of the course given at the Eleventh Modave Summer School in Mathematical Physics, 2015, aimed at PhD candidates and junior researchers in theoretical physics. We review in details the result of Coussaert-Henneaux-van Driel showing that the asymptotic dynamics of (2 + 1)- dimensional gravity with negative cosmological constant is described at the classical level by Liouville theory. Boundary conditions implement the asymptotic reduction in two steps: the first set reduces the SL(2,R) × SL(2,R) Chern-Simons action, equivalent to the Einstein action, to a non-chiral SL(2,R) Wess-Zumino-Witten model, while the second set imposes constraints on the WZW currents that reduce further the action to Liouville theory. We discuss the issues of considering the latter as an effective description of the dual conformal field theory describing AdS3 gravity beyond the semi-classical regime.
