Spatial Pleasures

This article suggests that a changing sensibility to spatial experience is a characteristic of modernity. It makes three assumptions: that modernity finds spatial manipulation thrilling, that spatial experience has a history that relates to the history of perception, and that the study of a society's entertainments can offer insights into its underlying shifts and disturbances. It draws on a range of theories on the role of the corporeal in perception to speculate as to how an audience might have experienced three popular entertainments from the early 20th century. All three shifted the boundaries of the body, not only in the apparent bodies of the performers but also, the author suggests, in ways that resonated within the bodies of their audiences. The author suggests that such internal resonances, engaging the senses imaginatively and viscerally, contribute to the perceptual vocabulary of modernity and often form part of the practice and experience of today's spatial arts.