Stardanceing - by Jeanne Robinson
I’ve been choreographing zero gravity dance since 1975, when my husband, writer Spider Robinson, first murmured, “I’ve started a story about a dancer in space. Will you help with the dance stuff?” My ears grew points. As a contemporary dance artist, I’ve always been interested in new ways of dancing, and of watching dance.
That conversation resulted in a novel, STARDANCE, which won the field’s highest awards, and nearly earned me a chance to try out free fall choreography in space. The opportunity vanished when Christa McAuliffe’s death in the Challenger disaster ended NASA’s Civilian In Space Program on its first flight. Years later after my dance career ended, Spider and I wrote two more novels in the series, STARSEED and STARMIND - all are still in print as THE STARDANCE TRILOGY.
Last New Year’s, after over thirty years of imagining it, I finally got to try weightless dance for real. Falling freely for a fleeting eternity is an unforgettable experience.
Peter Diamandis, creator of the Ansari X Prize, and founder of Zero-G Corporation (www.gozerog.com), a space tourism company offering weightless flights to the public, generously donated two seats. On December 30th I went up with Vancouver dancer Kathleen McDonagh to explore dancing in weightlessness. During fifteen parabolic arcs of twenty to twenty-two seconds each, Kathleen put some of my earliest choreographic concepts of zero-gravity dance to the test, as part of pre-production for my film “Stardance.” Producer/co-director James Sposto (www.sposto.com) came along to capture Kathleen on film during our weightless intervals. You can watch video and read reports of our experiences at www.stardancemovie.com.
The Stardance film is slated to be produced and presented in the 70/15 “Large Format” pioneered by the IMAX® corporation. It will combine artistic and humanistic themes with the backdrop of science and space exploration—exemplifying the grandeur, intrigue and promise of space, through the grace of dance unhindered by gravity.
Zero-G Corp went miles out of their way to help us, and adapt to our special needs. To start, they surprisingly cut back the number of flyers in our section to half the usual number. But as we began to work in microgravity, our fellow flyers backed away as far as they could, and watched in awe as Kathleen glided through the air. Just glance at the video clips, and you’ll notice Kathleen and I are the only people in frame. This unexpected, gratifying response confirmed my belief that dance belongs in space.
Absence of gravity - the only constant in all human lives - changes everything about dance. It has always been the necessary antagonist, the force against which art struggles. A dancer strives to move artistically, without quite being slapped to the floor by gravity…while seeming unaware of any such struggle.
In space, the necessary antagonist becomes not gravity, but inertia of motion: the body’s tendency to keep on doing whatever it was doing a moment ago.
Picture yourself inside a huge empty sphere in orbit, beside the wall. Reach out and give it a gentle push. You start drifting toward the far side of the sphere, and will keep drifting at the same speed until you get there no matter how far it is…unless something happens along the way to change either your direction or speed, together called your vector. Moving your body can have some effect—but not as much as you might think: air just isn’t thick enough to swim in. But you can shift your mass around your center. Space is the place they were talking about in physics class: there, every action really does have an equal and opposite reaction. Move both arms to the right, the rest of you moves to the left, and so on. It’s eerily beautiful to watch.
Other things can change your vector as you drift toward that far wall. You might encounter a bar and pivot around it (with any of your four extremities) into a new direction. Or a rope with some slack in it….or a trampoline. There are endless aesthetic possibilities for dance.
Those are some of the basic principles of zero-G dance, and Kathleen and Jim and I got to explore hardly any of them in this first flight, limited to 20 second intervals. But we made a start, tested several ideas successfully, got kinesthetically and personally acquainted with the experience we’re going to simulate onscreen, and got some effective promotional footage for our fundraising.
Let Kathleen close this by describing her own experience:
“I have an empathy for Jeanne’s aesthetic, a strong affinity with her ideas, and total admiration for her commitment, so I was honoured to be asked to be her first Stardancer.”
“From a purely physical/technical point of view there are two practices in my life that dominate and serve this work: the Gyrotonic® method and Contact Improvisation. I‘ve always felt them to be complimentary but never knew how much they’d serve the zero g experience. At the centre of all the elements - in my imagination, before the flight - was the recognition that presence is foremost. We worked hard on choreographed movement but there was always the very real 'but who knows?” “Fortunately reassessment in the air came quickly, as individuals and collectively, so in a sense we pursued the highest objective of space travel: exploration. It was all too short, but somehow epic, and I feel blessed. I hovered my way into a new year, and though I feel firmly rooted back on earth now, I am truly grateful for this real physical imprint of what I’d only imagined—for this most unique experience of levity.”
Jeanne Robinson is a writer, co-author, and choreographer specializing in contemporary dance-in-space.
For more information, visit: www.stardancemovie.com.
Kathleen McDonagh is a BC based dancer, choreographer, and teacher working as Jeanne Robinson’s first Stardancer,
collaborating in space.
This article was first printed in the Dance Central (March/April 2008, edition), the members' newsletter
of the Dance Centre, located in Vancouver, BC. For more information, visit: www.thedancecentre.ca