Exploring the Next Frontier of Human Expression in Microgravity

Since the 1990s, a handful of artists, choreographers, dancers, painters, jugglers, actors, and filmmakers, have boarded parabolic aircrafts in the spirit of inquiry.

Their work is pioneering, experimental, bold, largely unsung, and foundational.

Here they are.

★

Kitsou Dubois

➟ 1990s: Choreographer Kitsou Dubois worked with CNES, the French Space Agency. She was a pioneer in integrating contemporary dance with zero-gravity research and flew aboard the French parabolic aircraft Caravelle and later the Airbus A300 Zero-G.

★

Frank Pietronigro

➟ 1998: Artist Frank Pietronigro flew from NASA’s Johnson Space Center aboard a KC-135 turbojet to create “drift paintings” in microgravity. The results? Unpredictable. Intentionally so. A postmodern meditation on form and freedom.

★

Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung

➟ 1999: Led by Dragan Živadinov, this Slovenian performance collective, Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung, staged "Biomechanics Noordung" during a parabolic flight from Star City, Russia. Part theater, part space ritual, their work blurred the line between nostalgia and futurism.

★

V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media

➟ 2003: V2_, an interdisciplinary center for art and technology in Rotterdam, Netherlands, co-organized a series of parabolic flights and activities at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City, Russia. The first outcomes, research and projects were unveiled at a presentation and a seminar during the Architecture Biennial 2003. 

★

Jeanne Robinson "Stardance"

➟ 2007: Choreographer, and co-author of The Stardance Trilogy, Jeanne Robinson imagined a future where dance belonged among the stars. In the 1980s, she advocated to become the first civilian dancer in space — a dream cut short by the Challenger tragedy, but never extinguished. In 2007, she directed dancer Kathleen McDonagh in a short zero-gravity test flight — a fleeting moment of grace in freefall, and the closest glimpse of the Stardance film that was envisioned but never completed.

★

Ishiguro Dance Theater

➟ 2009: Japanese choreographer Setsuko Ishiguro and art director Takeshi Ishiguro, with Ishiguro Dance Theater, carried the spirit of cultural exploration into orbit with the Hiten Project. First tested on parabolic flights and later performed aboard the International Space Station by astronaut Koichi Wakata in 2009, the work reimagined the movements of ancient flying deities in weightlessness. The story of Hiten describes those who “send flowers from the sky, play music, and fly the high sky.” Framed as part of JAXA’s cultural pilot missions, Hiten stands as one of the earliest examples of dance deliberately designed for microgravity.

★

Guy Laliberté (Orbital 🚀)

➟ 2009: Guy Laliberté, the founder of Cirque du Soleil, spent 10 days aboard the International Space Station as a space tourist in, aiming to raise awareness about clean water access. Guy Laliberté did not perform but carried with him a red nose, honoring the clowns, fools and jesters from around the world.

★

Nahum and Ale de la Puente

➟ 2014: Artists Nahum and Ale de la Puente created “Matters of Gravity”, an interdisciplinary reflection about the cultural and scientific implications of the concept of gravity.

★

Jeanne Morel and Paul Marlier

➟ 2016: European astronauts Thomas Pesquet and Jean-François Clervoy sponsor the artistic exploration of dancer Jeanne Morel and digital artist Paul Marlier aboard the Airbus A310 Zero G. Jeanne made her first flight during a CNES scientific campaign.

★

Adam Dipert

➟ 2016: A nuclear physicist and professional circus artist, Adam Dipert lives at the intersection of gravity, mathematics, and embodied play. From parabolic flights to peer-reviewed papers, Adam has spent years choreographing motion in microgravity, developing Space Juggling, pioneering rotational dynamics software, and designing immersive weightless dance intensives. His work is both scientific inquiry and artistic invitation: a call to reimagine how we move, calculate, and express in altered gravitational states.

★

OK Go

➟ 2016: OK Go released their iconic music video "Upside Down & Inside Out", the most widely seen microgravity performance to date, shot aboard multiple parabolic flights, Their performance set the bar for the wonderfully surprising theatrical play possible in microgravity. If you haven’t seen it, you are in for a treat!

★

Sarah Gillis (Orbital 🚀)

➟ 2024: Sarah Gillis, a classically trained violinist and SpaceX engineer, became the first person to play the violin in space during the Polaris Dawn mission, performing "Rey's Theme" from Star Wars.

Look how comfortable she is in microgravity.... meant to be there!

These artists dreamed boldly.

Pursuing questions very few had answers to.

Their experiments, poetic, rigorous, weird, is making ours possible.

We are not the first to fly. We are not the first to float.

We will be the first to stage an original multimedia performance in microgravity.

Join us. Pioneer Culture in Space.

"We need to prepare for a future that is inevitable. Train artists for space environments and develop the new stories and experiences we will present and partake in Space, today."

Natasha Tsakos

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