Kitsou Dubois: influences, peers and legacy

Every connection with its receipt

Kitsou Dubois is the choreographer who turned weightlessness into a dance technique, training in CNES and ESA parabolic flights from 1990 and building a body of research on how the body organizes itself without a vertical axis. This mix traces her lineage back through American postmodern dance's gravity experiments and French chronophotography, sideways into circus and aerial arts, and forward into today's gravity-obsessed stagecraft.

The Kynda mix for Kitsou Dubois

• Key Influence · Man Walking Down the Side of a Building by Trisha Brown (1970). Brown's Equipment Pieces literally rotated the dancer's relationship to gravity, using rigging to make a wall into a floor — the founding gesture of the postmodern interrogation of verticality that Dubois pushed to its physical limit in parabolic flight. Where Brown negotiated with gravity by mechanical means, Dubois removed it outright aboard CNES Zero-G aircraft, asking the same question: what remains of technique when the ground moves?','','
• Influencia Obscura · Magnesium by Steve Paxton (1972). Paxton's students throwing themselves through air and catching each other seeded contact improvisation, the technique built on falling, rolling and the small dance of the standing spine. Dubois's flight training draws on exactly this vocabulary of shared weight and disorientation; contact improvisation is the one Western form that already treats the floor as negotiable, making it the natural ground school for a body about to lose its ground entirely.
• Local Roots · Codex by Philippe Decouflé (1986). Decouflé emerged from the same 1980s French nouvelle danse ferment as Dubois, mixing circus, mime and visual invention against the austerity of contemporary dance orthodoxy. His Paris-region company culture — hybrid, technically curious, comfortable with apparatus and film — is the ecology in which Dubois could plausibly propose that a choreographer belongs aboard a research aircraft rather than only in a studio.
• Beyond the Medium · Études de locomotion (chronophotography) by Étienne-Jules Marey (1886). Marey, the French physiologist who photographed falling cats, flying birds and walking men on a single plate, invented the laboratory analysis of movement that Dubois's work continues by other means. Her flight research generates the same kind of data-image: bodies decomposed into trajectories, orientation lost, motion studied scientifically while remaining unmistakably beautiful. Science apparatus as artistic instrument, a century apart.
• Peer · Plan B by Aurélien Bory (2003). Bory's Compagnie 111 built a tilting plane that rotated from floor to wall, turning performers into objects obeying and defying slope — a stage physics experiment contemporary with Dubois's flight research. Both come out of the French nouveau cirque and physical theatre milieu where engineering, apparatus and choreography are inseparable, and both treat gravity as the collaborator and antagonist of the performer.
• From the Canon · Trajectoire fluide by Kitsou Dubois (1999). Emerging directly from Dubois's parabolic flight campaigns with CNES, this piece translates the sensations of microgravity — continuous momentum, absent axis, the body organized around no floor — into work made for earthbound stages using water, rigging and video from the flights themselves. It is the clearest statement of her core proposition: that weightlessness is not a spectacle but a technique to be learned.
• Key Collaborator · Hic Hoc by Jérôme Thomas (2001). Thomas revolutionized French juggling by treating the object's flight path as choreography rather than trick, developing what he called jonglage musical with dancers and composers. Jugglers are the performers most acutely tuned to parabolas and fall times, which is why Dubois's world of circus-based research and Thomas's world of gravity-obsessed object manipulation overlap so closely in the French nouveau cirque scene.
• Legacy · Celui qui tombe by Yoann Bourgeois (2014). Bourgeois built a career on gravity as dramatic material: rotating platforms, trampolines, endless falls and recoveries staged as existential comedy. He belongs to the generation of French circus-trained artists formed in institutions where Dubois's research into disorientation, suspension and the physics of the falling body had already legitimized gravity itself as the choreographer's true subject matter.

What influenced Kitsou Dubois

• 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick (1968). 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick) — culture for Kitsou Dubois (themoviedb.org)
• Serpentine Dance by Loie Fuller (1896). Serpentine Dance (Loie Fuller) — ghost for Kitsou Dubois
• Man Walking Down the Side of a Building by Trisha Brown (1970). Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (Trisha Brown) — titan for Kitsou Dubois
• Magnesium by Steve Paxton (1972). Magnesium (Steve Paxton) — ghost for Kitsou Dubois
• Trio A by Yvonne Rainer (1966). Trio A (Yvonne Rainer) — titan for Kitsou Dubois
• Études de locomotion (chronophotography) by Étienne-Jules Marey (1886). Études de locomotion (chronophotography) (Étienne-Jules Marey) — culture for Kitsou Dubois

Peers and kindred spirits

• L'Homme de Hus by Camille Boitel (2007). L'Homme de Hus (Camille Boitel) — collaborator for Kitsou Dubois
• May B by Maguy Marin (1981). May B (Maguy Marin) — geography for Kitsou Dubois
• Hic Hoc by Jérôme Thomas (2001). Hic Hoc (Jérôme Thomas) — collaborator for Kitsou Dubois
• Codex by Philippe Decouflé (1986). Codex (Philippe Decouflé) — geography for Kitsou Dubois
• Le Cri du caméléon by Josef Nadj (1995). Le Cri du caméléon (Josef Nadj) — peer for Kitsou Dubois
• Plan B by Aurélien Bory (2003). Plan B (Aurélien Bory) — peer for Kitsou Dubois

Who Kitsou Dubois influenced

• Celui qui tombe by Yoann Bourgeois (2014). Celui qui tombe (Yoann Bourgeois) — legacy for Kitsou Dubois