How Artists Are Exploring the Possibilities and Implications of Dance in Space
In a performance at the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces this past June, Sasha Peterson leaned the side of her body onto Michael Figueroa’s shoulders, sharing weight in a traditional contact-improvisational lift. But rather than disembark back to the floor, Peterson rolled down Figueroa’s back—and stayed there, her body perpendicular to his, suspended in space.
How? The answer in this case was Velcro-covered suits, lent by choreographer David Parker, who created Slapstuck, the 2004 duet that served as the base material for their performance. Velcro is just one form of technology that dancers are using to simulate the effects of weightlessness here on Earth. But for some, the end goal is to experience a true lack of gravity by bringing dance to space.
“Dance in zero gravity completely transforms how we think about choreography and performance,” says Sydney Skybetter, the founder of CRCI and director of the Brown Arts Institute at Brown University. “When you remove the floor, which is the fundamental organizing principle of terrestrial dance, bodies become three-dimensional sculptures moving through space multi-axially.” And whether dance artists are exploring movement in microgravity theoretically or literally, the relationship between dance and space brings up myriad questions—creative, logistical, and ethical.
Finding Microgravity on Earth
There are a number of ways to simulate dance without gravity here on Earth, and dancemakers are experimenting with several of them. Last March, Peterson, Figueroa, and fellow dance artists Laila Franklin and Kate Gow came together for CRCI’s Movement in Microgravity residency, in which they created a base dance phrase and tested it in environments with varying gravitational relationships. In addition to working with Velcro suits, the group ventured to a trampoline park, an anti-gravity yoga class, float tanks, a pool, and a spatial-orientation laboratory. “In the most wonderful way, trying the phrase failed a number of times,” says CRCI executive producer Ariane Michaud, who also participated in many of the experiments. “By the time we got to the pool, they let it go and worked on rotations and disorientation.”
Multidisciplinary artist Sage Ni’Ja Whitson is also finding unique ways to mimic space on Earth. Since 2017, they’ve been working on a series of projects called The Unarrival Experiments, which include research into dark matter and dark energy through a Black queer and trans-embodied lens. Their re-creations of the extraterrestrial have ranged from the low-tech (achieving complete darkness with blindfolds) to the high-tech (working with a light-locked sculpture and creating simulations with virtual reality). “I wanted to find a sense of the fantastical,” says Whitson.
Imagining Dance in Space
When asked what they think dance without gravity would actually be like, many dancemakers struggle to answer. “I don’t know what a good space dance looks like,” says Skybetter. “The Western dance tradition only has so much to bear in terms of what it means to do this well.”
But there’s excitement in that unknown. Some dancers are interested not in bringing codified dance steps into space, but in taking the gravity out of a gravity-based practice. In 2022, dancer, geologist, and planetary scientist C. Adeene Denton wrote an essay in this magazine about her dream of dancing on the International Space Station. She’s spent a great deal of time both watching and speaking with astronauts and has enjoyed learning about the movements in microgravity that these experts already find fun. “What they like to do in their spare time is to try to crank up the momentum and shoot themselves through different passageways, or figure out different ways that they can spin,” she says. Denton is also fascinated by effort. Astronauts living on the ISS, for example, learn how much energy they need to exert just to stay put. In order to stay still to work or eat, they grip a railing with just one or two toes.
When she imagines what it would be like to dance on the ISS, Denton dreams about dueting with the space station itself. “Astronauts there are constantly drifting and following the motion of the space station as it orbits the Earth,” she says. “So, I think it could be really interesting to try to do the microgravity equivalent of standing in one place.”
Complicating the Space Narrative
Whitson is now beginning research in aerial performance techniques, with a goal of continuing their research via parabolic flight—the closest thing to space travel currently available on Earth—and, eventually, actual space travel. CRCI’s Movement in Microgravity residency was also originally designed to culminate in a parabolic flight, in which a specialized aircraft creates reduced-gravity conditions with steep climb-and-dive maneuvers that trace arcs through the sky. Each reduced-gravity phase lasts 20 to 30 seconds, with flights including up to 40 phases.
But now the residency’s participants are less certain the flight is something they want to try. This is partially physical—parabolic flights, known as “vomit comets,” can be incredibly hard on the body—and partly ethical. The dancers are questioning the cost of parabolic flights, where dedicated research space can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and some artists have expressed concern over the privatization of space travel by billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. “Right now, space exploration is being shaped by people with some extremely problematic ideological stances,” says Skybetter.
Denton has advanced through multiple stages of the astronaut-selection process, but given the societal shifts around space exploration she’s not sure if it’s still her goal. “It’s not really a place from which you can then critique the framework of space travel,” she says. “I would still love to dance in microgravity, but I think that is ultimately kind of a selfish dream that needs to be superseded by doing the kinds of good things on Earth that we can do.”
Fighting the Frontier Mentality
“Star Trek” famously dubbed space “the final frontier.” Many dance artists are working to investigate what that language symbolizes. “A frontier mentality is, in Elon Musk’s case, a colonial mentality,” says Skybetter. “The word ‘frontier’ is reduplicating the exact kinds of extractive modalities that we are seeking to resist. It’s an architecture of violence and power that defines who gets to imagine, who gets to participate.”
The fear, as Whitson puts it, is that “left in the hands of the uber-wealthy, space travel will look like the colonization of every other industry, place, and people.” That anxiety raises the stakes on artists’ investigations of the extraterrestrial. No, dancers don’t need to perform in space. But dancers may be uniquely poised to disrupt and diversify the field.
“Space has never been hospitable to folks of color, to femme bodies, to disabled bodies,” says Skybetter, adding that justice-oriented dancers are hyperaware of the exclusionary assumptions of dance history. And in an environment that completely disorients the body, “dancers are especially well-equipped to train and to understand their bodies and other peoples’ bodies,” adds Michaud. “This is a future that’s happening. I think it’s important for us as artists to watch that and to explore the possibilities.”
