Terpsichore and the architects: 'I have a deep sense of my body's architecture … the skeleton', said choreographer Trisha Brown in her prelude to the Royal Academy Forum which brought the worlds of dance and architecture together. In these pages Jeremy Melvin summarizes contributions, from a classicist, two architects, three choreographers and artist David Ward

When I first started doing Indian classical dance I had the idea that I was in a neutral space. But I realized that it was not neutral; it only seemed neutral because I had become used to a particular way of relating to it. That was the first thing I started to question. Like ballet, Indian dance uses turnout, when you rotate your hip joint and make a very extrovert surface of your body, and that sets so many things in place. It is like being given a Doric column and asked to incorporate it into every building! I felt as if the building had been 70 per cent pre-designed.

JB Could you explain what you mean when you say dance deals with space in a time-driven way?

SJ Coming from a background in Indian dance, I grew up with the idea that dance is about carving out space. A lot of people, architects particularly, look at dance as making patterns and shapes in space. In Indian classical dance one is very familiar with the shape of the dancing Shiva. Shiva patterns space in a very symmetrical way. Indian dance is about telling eternal truths about the body and space. The dancer is like an icon keeping people in touch with elemental shapes that the body makes. Through the dancing body people are able to recognize the same primary shapes, diagonals, circles and squares that exist in nature.

Unlike architecture, dance presents ideas of space in the very particular medium of time. You cannot linger over shapes, or travel again and again through the wonderful arch you happen to like. A dance performance communicates very complex information about space and shape, but the audience can only access it through the medium of time. The signature of the choreographer lies not so much in the way they use space, but how they carve up the architecture of time.

JB For me that gives space a whole new perspective. Are the number systems of Indian architecture and dance related?

SJ Indian dance can have a very organic relationship to architecture. Some dances were designed to be seen in south Indian temples, and they have a very arithmetical rhythm. In the dance you see all the features of those temples; they are manifest in the way dance uses the body. The body is turned into a prototype for perfect symmetry, so everything that is done on the right side is immediately done on the left, and the way it progresses through space is also symmetrical. In its rhythmic structures you see the same sort of architectural principles. In India we don't do these dances in temples, but if you show them in theatres, an Indian audience brings an understanding of that tradition, in number, rhythm and the way dance uses space.

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It seemed strange to put Indian classical dancers, creating their own kind of meaning in other spaces. What classical dance creates, to use an architectural simile, is a huge public building, whose conventions are supposed to be in the public arena. It's rather like the understanding Londoners have of the underground, of how the ticket machines and tunnels work. The audience should be familiar with this, knowing the equivalents of where the escalators are the ticket office is and what happens if you have the wrong ticket. But when touring Indian classical dance through Britain, I realized there was something wrong in me taking something that amounts to making a very public building and recreating it in places like Accrington on a November evening. There was such a mismatch between the intentions of the dance and what people were perceiving. People don't necessarily know the conventions. No matter what building you create, they always assume it's the Taj Mahal.