Kitsou Dubois and the Weightless Body

Exploring dance in weightlessness echoes many of the issues raised today in other fields of contemporary art and theory. Weightlessness relates to cyberspace in the sense that there are no privileged directions or hierarchies. But, unlike cyberspace, weightlessness can be physically inhabited, and has the potential to build upon and expand new media art discourses. Weightlessness is inscribed in the limits of the self and the human body, in an inside and an outside that we can see in current technological trends in smart architecture and clothing. French dancer and choreographer Kitsou Dubois pioneered microgravity dance in the early 1990s. She started her career in the 1980s, when contemporary dance was blooming in France. Dubois quickly moved away from the cozy environments and clean horizontal floors of theaters to dance on building facades and in former factories, looking for unusual venues that would help reconsider the different spaces of dance - the architectural space around the dancers, the space created by them, the space between them - and allow for new inquiries about movement. Weightlessness emerged as a logical step in her artistic path.