Summer's here and the time is right for dancin' in the street

Can I tell you a guilty secret? There's things in life I know I should like, and no matter how much I try, I just can't. Top of the list is poetry (aside from Ted Hughes, T.S Elliot and Lewis Carrol. Unless Dr Seuss counts too), opera and dance - any dance really that you have to watch instead of do, but especially ballet. Frustratingly, I know that on paper these should be the things I enjoy - I'm not proud, I've tried to learn; from ballet in the Kremlin to handing over sums of money equivalent to a small African nation's GDP for tickets to the ENO. But I find my aversion to dance particularly galling. Watching the seemingly impossible bendiness of limbs and gravity defying trickery I couldn't help but ask: "But why?". It just didn't click, until one of my much wiser and long-suffering friends took me to the Laban (that's Lahhh-bun, not La-ban, pronunciation geeks).

As I discovered watching Russell Maliphant's Critical Mass, there's something in the appreciation of the pure forms created, and the spaces defined and even recharacterised by the movement of bodies in space which draws strong analogies with architecture (or at least, the kind of architecture I like). The play of light upon a surface, the ability to creative a narrative within silence, and the reliance upon symbolism and implied meaning and structure, forming language using the movement in place of words or materials. Like an artistic installation, the performance requires an understanding of the scale of the space, the audience's experience from their given vantage point, the ebb and flow of emotional engagement.

A sense of interaction with place is even made explicit in Wim Wenders' Pina, a film which manages to use 3D technology for good rather than shiny mundanity, and which reappropriates the buildings, streets and transport structure of the wonderfully named Wuppertal as integral characters within each dance piece. One dancer describes how the choreographer sees the surfaces of rock, water and soil as surfaces which are to be moved on, over and through, in terms of pure interaction with context - however artificial - rather than passive engagement.

So it transpires that the key to my quandary may lie in the fact that "but why" is actually something I repeatedly find myself asking of modern architecture, not modern dance. All this shape-making and structural ingenuity simply has no narrative without the understanding of place and context, the experience of the audience. And not stepping on others' toes.

But you won't catch me down Saddlers Wells any sooner than you'll find me swooning over a Make planning application.