Live Art in Microgravity: influences, peers and legacy

Every connection with its receipt

Live art in microgravity is a small, stubborn lineage: choreographers, painters and theatre-makers who bought seats on parabolic flights to test what a body means without a floor. Its roots run through postmodern dance's obsession with gravity and falling, through Yves Klein's staged leap, and through Cold War space imagery. This mix traces the ground it stood on before it left the ground.

The Kynda mix for Live Art in Microgravity

• Key Influence · Man Walking Down the Side of a Building by Trisha Brown (1970). Brown's Equipment Pieces rigged a performer in harness to walk a SoHo façade, rotating the floor ninety degrees and forcing audiences to read gravity as a choreographic variable rather than a given. Every parabolic-flight artist inherits this premise: change the direction of weight and ordinary pedestrian movement becomes alien. Brown's rope-and-pulley solutions prefigure the tethers and foot restraints used in zero-g dramaturgy.medium: dance.
• Influencia Obscura · Biomechanics Noordung by Dragan Živadinov (1999). The Slovenian director staged this piece aboard a Russian Ilyushin-76 parabolic flight from Star City, then declared a fifty-year performance repeating every decade until 2045, replacing each dead performer with a symbol and eventually with satellites. Živadinov's postgravity art, developed from the Neue Slowenische Kunst milieu, is the most rigorous theatrical dramaturgy of weightlessness anyone has attempted, and remains barely known outside Ljubljana.
• Local Roots · Le Sacre du printemps by Pina Bausch (1975). Bausch's peat-covered stage is the exact inverse of weightlessness: dancers ground into earth until exhaustion, weight made visible as suffering. European Tanztheater is the immediate context for the French and German choreographers who took parabolic flights from Bordeaux-Mérignac with Novespace, and rehearsal language around fall, effort and collapse comes straight from this continental lineage of gravity as dramatic content.
• Beyond the Medium · Leap into the Void by Yves Klein (1960). Klein's photomontage of himself launching off a Fontenay-aux-Roses wall, published in his fake newspaper as proof of a man in space, is the founding image of the artist claiming weightlessness before the technology existed. Klein's monochrome immateriality and judo training both fed the pose. Zero-gravity performance inherits its central problem from this picture: the event is invisible without documentation, and documentation always lies.
• Peer · Set and Reset by Trisha Brown Dance Company (1983). Rauschenberg designed the flying transparent set, projections and near-invisible costumes for this Brown work, extending the Judson-era collaboration between visual artists and choreographers. That model, artist and dancer sharing authorship of a physical environment, is exactly how parabolic-flight pieces are made: cabin, padding, camera rig and body are designed together, because the aircraft interior is the scenography.
• From the Canon · Trajectoire fluide by Kitsou Dubois (1999). Kitsou Dubois, the first choreographer to train with a space agency, developed Trajectoire fluide through parabolic flights with CNES and Novespace aboard the Airbus Zero-G out of Bordeaux-Mérignac. Drawing on years of preparing cosmonauts' body awareness since 1990, she filmed dancers releasing terrestrial verticality in 22-second weightless arcs, translating the research into stage and video work that became the founding document of microgravity choreography.
• Key Collaborator · The Weight of Things by Novespace (1997). Novespace, the CNES subsidiary operating France's Airbus Zero-G from Bordeaux, is the invisible co-author of European microgravity art: it supplies the aircraft, the flight surgeons, the padding and the twenty-two-parabola profile that dictates the form's rhythm. Dubois and later artists flew with them, and the company's technical documentation of parabolic campaigns is effectively the score every zero-g performance is written against.
• Legacy · Aquabatics by Sarah Jane Pell (2003). Pell, a commercial diver turned performance artist and later an artist-astronaut candidate, built a practice of performing in extreme environments from underwater to analogue space habitats. Water immersion is the standard training substitute for weightlessness, and her work carries the microgravity lineage into a research context, arguing that artists belong in the same testing pipeline as spaceflight crews rather than as passengers.

What influenced Live Art in Microgravity

• 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick (1968). 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick) — culture for Live Art in Microgravity (themoviedb.org)
• Biomechanics Noordung by Dragan Živadinov (1999). Biomechanics Noordung (Dragan Živadinov) — ghost for Live Art in Microgravity “The Slovenian theater director Dragan Živadinov staged a performance called Noordung Zero Gravity Biomechanical during a parabolic flight organized through the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center facility in Star City in 1999.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Drift Painting in Microgravity by Frank Pietronigro (1998). Drift Painting in Microgravity (Frank Pietronigro) — ghost for Live Art in Microgravity “In 1998, Frank Pietronigro flew Research Project Number 33: Investigating the Creative Process in a Micro-gravity Environment, where he created 'drift paintings' and danced in microgravity space.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Magnesium by Steve Paxton (1972). Magnesium (Steve Paxton) — titan for Live Art in Microgravity
• Air for the G String by Doris Humphrey (1928). Air for the G String (Doris Humphrey) — titan for Live Art in Microgravity
• Man Walking Down the Side of a Building by Trisha Brown (1970). Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (Trisha Brown) — titan for Live Art in Microgravity
• Leap into the Void by Yves Klein (1960). Leap into the Void (Yves Klein) — culture for Live Art in Microgravity
• The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment by Ilya Kabakov (1985). The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (Ilya Kabakov) — culture for Live Art in Microgravity

Peers and kindred spirits

• Set and Reset by Trisha Brown Dance Company (1983). Set and Reset (Trisha Brown Dance Company) — peer for Live Art in Microgravity (wikidata.org)
• The Weight of Things by Novespace (1997). The Weight of Things (Novespace) — collaborator for Live Art in Microgravity
• Le Sacre du printemps by Pina Bausch (1975). Le Sacre du printemps (Pina Bausch) — geography for Live Art in Microgravity
• Aerial Bold by Elizabeth Streb (2010). Aerial Bold (Elizabeth Streb) — peer for Live Art in Microgravity
• Danse Serpentine by Loïe Fuller (1892). Danse Serpentine (Loïe Fuller) — geography for Live Art in Microgravity
• Trio A by Yvonne Rainer (1966). Trio A (Yvonne Rainer) — collaborator for Live Art in Microgravity

Who Live Art in Microgravity influenced

• Aquabatics by Sarah Jane Pell (2003). Aquabatics (Sarah Jane Pell) — legacy for Live Art in Microgravity
• The Fever by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (2019). The Fever (Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui) — legacy for Live Art in Microgravity