I am fairly certain that for most of human history the generally preferred arrangement for ceremony and ‘entertainment’ was the circle. The crucial thing to recognize here is that the participants are looking not merely at whatever they were gathered ‘around’, but they were also -=seeing each other=- and each other’s faces, reactions, expressions. This points up how bizarre our own arrangements are, where we each sit like an individual, facing some spectacle. Not seeing each other. Alone in the crowd.