Our constant invention of machines and interactive processes to multiply and extend bodily relations to the world is mirrored in the transformations of theatre, its physical organization being tightly intertwined with its dramatic contents. In the past, the shaping and experiencing of theatre have been hugely modified by advances related to mechanics and electricity. Information and communications and biotechnologies are in turn prompting new means to expose live art, and new conceptions of the performing body. Yet all these technological forces continue to animate a theatrical corpus, which is as ancient as it is metamorphic. This text cuts across history to reveal some of the ways in which anatomies of contemporary live art seem to perpetuate the primitive vitality of theatre.

Theatre Architectures as Social Anatomies

The structural characteristics of theatre architecture s reflect the anatomy of the body politic that they convene and contain. The principles of social organisation are written into theatrical venues ranging from early open air settings for processions and site-specific action, through to dedicated, sealed architectures which have marked theatre history since the Renaissance. Like the anatomical theatre, these architectures have been shaped by multiple, mutually determinant forces and goals. Vectors of perception (sightlines, acoustics) and social mores dictating public rank and station are instrumental in ‘exogenous’ concrete design questions like choices of scale and materials, to be compared with simultaneously active ‘endogenous’ questions proper to the poetics of theatre, attempts to engage, enthral or alienate an audience being as bound up in dramaturgical processes as in physical construction.

The endo/exogenous distinction is however largely formal, in that social and physical architectures are inextricably and vitally interwoven in the staging of live art; indissociable links between dramaturgical and architectural languages are evident throughout theatre history. Staged space literally offered readings to French court ballet spectators: social status and correlative physical positioning of royal gallery viewers allowed them to decipher symbols in choreographic floor patterns. Three concentric circles represented Perfect Truth, two equilateral triangles within a circle represented Supreme Power, etc., in addition to imposed values such as the sovereign's monogram (McGowan, 1963).