Circular movements and spaces, and circular and cyclical temporal forms...
... allow for departures from the known into sensation, and from the nameable into the physically felt. Circular processes, shapes, and motions can enable physical states of excess and ecstasy, of being outside or beside oneself. This begins with the architectural settings, in which recent revolutions and uprisings have taken place. “Is it accidental that official displays consist of neat rectangles, countable cohorts, marching past and under the fixed gaze of the reviewing stand, while unofficial mass gatherings are vortexed, whirling, full of shifting ups and downs, multi-focussed events generating tension between large-scale actions and many local dramas?”[1]. Crowds in “Tiananmen Square, Washington [1970], Leipzig, or Berlin” gather in “big circular groups”[2], or, one could add, march along circular routes. Bodies move in circles across or in towns, an uprising “is staged as, or ends in swirls, vortexes of activities moving in spirals and circles with not-easy-to-locate centres or heads. Multivocal and multifocal, a popular deconstructing of hierarchy.”[3]
[1] Schechner, ‘Invasions Friendly and Unfriendly: The Dramaturgy of Direct Theatre’, 462.
[2] Schechner, 477.
[3] Schechner, 479.