From Liturgy to the Globe: the Changing Concept of Space

Summary

The starting point of my argument is the assumption that spatial and temporal structures and relationships are basic to the way in which societies both shape and comprehend the world around them. These structures and relationships may be of dual natures: physical, belonging to the empirical world, and mental, belonging to imaginary, fictional or metaphysical realms. Thus, among other creations of the human mind and technical skills, theatre and drama may be seen as reflections of particular cognitive models of the universe, created in given periods. One of the peculiar features of theatre is the division, which may generally be defined as one between two times and two spaces, that of the performers and that of the spectators. This division lies at the very roots of the rise of theatre and drama and their further evolution and the whole history of theatre may in fact be depicted as a constantly changing relationship between the two spaces and between the two times, the spatio-temporal continuum of the auditorium and that belonging to the artistic realm created on the stage during a spectacle.