I am going to describe a workshop technique that makes the abstractions of conceptual thought available as physical experiences, and in so doing, makes abstraction itself—usually thought of as a danger to theatre work—available to theatre, both as a subject matter and as an untapped source of performance energies.

There is a tendency, in most branches of contemporary thought, to use metaphors of space for all sorts of concepts and relationships that are not in themselves spatial. Literary critics locate the nuances of a word in “semantic space.” Psychiatrists refer to the “therapeutic space” in which they encounter their patients. Anthropologists imagine networks of kin-relationships spread out in “social space.” Musicologists speak of a “harmonic space” within which tones and timbres are distributed.