Cultivating space: artifact and agency in the case of theatre before and beyond its scenes

Abstract

This essay addresses theatre space as a distinct actualization of a social site, namely that collective organization that is formulated in the context of performative activity. It seeks to further the understanding of its operations in constituting agency and the collective by way of examining physical space as an experiential field. It proposes an approach and institutes the methodological tools to enable analysis of architectural space at an empirical level and in terms of its unmediated nonmediating effects, accessing the productive embedded in the corporeality of space-body relationships. Theatre space is examined and ascertained as a site through which realities of the social are grasped, and immediate bodily experience in and through space is confirmed as an authentic path of acquiring practical knowledge. Bearing on the conceptualization of built architectural space, as well as on the material practices of constituting and inhabiting space, this study concretizes less-charted aspects of sociospatial reciprocities, the physical and the social self, and discloses the experiential lying with built space as a means of cultural continuity.