Dancing bodies and the architectural built environment manipulate space, in this case dance and architecture share the same concern, and the shared concern is space.

But what is space? Is it static and always there, or is it ‘produced’ by movement and by construction? Is it three-dimensional as we commonly understand it, or is Time also part of the equation, as Einstein and the physicists after him have proposed – giving us notions of ‘spacetime’? Is it measurable, or is space itself a measure? Is it a conceptual framework, or does it have its own ontology – its own nature of being and existence? Is space a perception? Can it be owned or, what do we really own when a ‘space’ is ours?

These are not my questions; they have been, for centuries, part of the philosophical and scientific discourse about space. They make it clear at once that space and spatiality – or spatial property – are complex and multi-layered; the space which dance and architecture claim to share is not only physical, for there is more to space than we see in its physicality.

The more one thinks about it then, the idea of ‘space’ is neither neutral nor universal: space is a concept underpinned, simultaneously, by historical, geographical, social, political and cultural significations. There is not one space but many spaces, simultaneously intersecting each other, just as there is not one dance and one architecture but a plurality of differently conceived dancerly and architectural endeavours.