zero gravity

dazed & confused #56, 07.99

Kitsou Dubois is a dancer with a difference. She dances in space - not just any old space, but outer space. Well... almost. Although she hasn't yet escaped the atmosphere, since 1990 Dubois has been been taking trips on 'the Vomit Comet', a plane used by the European Space Agency to train astronauts in zero gravity conditions. And zero-g is what Dubois is into.

The Vomit Comet is essentially a stripped down Caravel airliner with all the seats removed and lots of padding spread around the walls and floor. The pilot flies it at a steep angle high up into the atmosphere and then describes a parabolic curve. Just as on a big dipper, as the plane crosses the apex of the curve and begins its descent the occupants experience a few moments of weightlessness - maybe half a second on the rollercoaster, but a full 25 seconds in the plane. When you realise that thirteen of these parabolas are flown on each flight (Dubois has done nine flights in all) you begin to understand how the plane got its nickname. Even hardened astronauts are regularly sick on board, and everyone who goes up has first to be injected with a powerful amphetamine-based drug cocktail to help combat the nausea.

But why zero-g? Dubois is a Parisian student of the New Dance, a modern dance form pioneered in the US by the likes of Merce Cunningham and Steve Paxton; one of its missions being to take dance out of the theatre and into other arenas. Earlier in her career Dubois found herself dancing down the sides of buildings with the aid of a climbing harness and conducting performances on the banks of the Seine, but a chance meeting with an astronaut convinced her that it was time that dance took itself to the final frontier. As she says, 'perhaps dance was the first art - it is fitting that it should be the first art in space.'

But after spending time with NASA in Houston and doing some of the training flights, Dubois realised that there was more to what she wanted to do than dance alone. She began to see that the various space agencies had not properly explored the possibilities of the body in weightless conditions: thanks partly to a culture of military bravado, astronauts were moving around according to a set of assumptions about efficiency of movement that were not properly responsive to the needs or demands of the body and its systems of balance in the new environment. Dubois felt that her dancer's experience and training qualified her to try and rethink these assumptions, and embarked on a true melding of art and science, which involved not only finding a new space for dance but discovering a kinaesthetic for the body in a genuinely new space.

You may have seen her floating across the street screens of the Lux cinema in Hoxton Square during March and April of this year; this month [May/June] she will be completing her new series of parabolic flights. As she prepared to boldly go, Dazed and Confused tethered her to Earth with the promise of a meal at Hoxton's Viet-Ho.

James Flint: Does it make you afraid, doing the parabolic flights?

Kitsou Dubois: No, I am always exhilarated. The reaction of those on board is either sickness or excitement - there is no in-between.

JF: What's the first thing you notice about zero-g - as a dancer?

KD: Weightlessness stretches the expressive moment of the dance, achieved at the moment of lift if you are a ballet dancer, and extends it out to infinity. This is very interesting, especially to me. How can I find some new movement in a new space, what movement does a particular space provoke? These are the questions I've always been interested in, and I suppose that this a reason why by chance I met an astronaut.

JF: How was that?

KD: Because I had a friend, an architect friend, who was working on the habitability ergonomics of a space station, and he asked me if I knew anything about ergonomic problems, you understand? For me this was the first time I encountered the problems of astronauts. From the media I had got the impression that everything was okay, that there wasn't a problem with working in zero-g, but now I noticed that they have many problems with self-orientation in weightless conditions and other things like that. And I realised that there is relationship between our training as dancers and their problems. I wanted to make a little project about this relationship and my architect friend mentioned it to a Dutch astronaut who was interested enough to meet with me. And this was the beginning of my story with zero-g.

[Waitress arrives with food]

JF: Oh yeah, that's me, rice vermicelli with mixed vegetables and tofu.

Rob La Frenais (Director, Arts Catalyst): You should try this.

JF: Um, yeah. I don't know what it is, but it's very good.

RLF: I think that's the idea, that we put all our bits into bowls. That we give ourselves little bits in bowls. This needs chopping into four. Let's ask for a knife.

JF: So what was this first meeting like?

KD: Well when I met this astronaut I felt that he understood me, even though the psychology of the astronaut is very bizarre. They don't say anything like that directly, you have to feel it, because they are very... comment, qu'est que ce le mot...

JF: En francais?

KD: Je cherche en francais aussi... ils sont efficaces... They don't look for something. They know something and they say it. But not...

RLF: Could we have a knife please? Just to chop this up.

JF: You mean that they're very efficacious? In other words, they're very good at getting results, but not so good at talking about their feelings or personal experiences?

KD: Oui, c'est ca. If you are astronaut you have to have wanted to be one for many many years, and if you finally become one it's not the time to say I feel sick or I don't function so well in zero-g. It's impossible that an astronaut will tell you, 'I was sick.' But I felt that this Dutch astronaut understood me, and that he knew that it is not so easy to be in zero-g, that there are many problems, you know. And just on the basis of that feeling I decided to begin the big story of how to enter into this institution of the space agency.

JF: What was your experience of the astronauts and scientists you met during your three months at NASA?

KD: Ah! NASA was not so kindly with me - because I am French, because I am a woman, because I am a dancer! It was too much for them. And it was very hard for me. But after that I understood many things about the space industry, and when I when I came back to France and I decided to enter in the laboratory of CNRS, the laboratory of Neurophysiological Research in France, which works on the human problems in microgravity.

JF: Is that where you made the film of some of your early flights, the one that's showing at the Lux?

KD: Yes, and everybody got a little bit anxious about that, thinking, 'What is this woman? She has no right to be here!' It was all very bizarre for the French space agency and perhaps a little bit ahead of them. Nobody understood me, not until Arts Catalyst came along. With a story like this, there's a time when you're too much in advance for people to understand what you are doing, and then comes a moment when you are exactly in tune. Now I think the space agency are keen to have more experiments like this, that it might be okay to open up to the arts, but I think when I did that, I was a little bit in advance you know. And so some people were with me and other people were against me.

JF: So when did you make your first flight?

KD: That was in 1990. The first flight was just to try and see what the possibilities were, if my project would work. But then it turned out I was very well adapted to zero-g, and so we did a second flight to find out why: because I am Kitsou? Or because I am a dancer? So I made three flights with three dancers, three different dancers, and all of them were very well adapted. So I thought, I can prove it that this is because of dance experience. After that I proposed training some non-dancer people, because they told me, okay, you need ten years to become a dancer, but we have no time for the astronauts to do that. So how can we give this experience to an astronaut very quickly? So I proposed a 36 hour training programme based on a dancer's training and carried out in various different environments that were analogues of weightlessness. I chose first a dance studio, then in the water with a very specific method of swimming to adapt to the water and find a movement that goes with the water, not against the water, and then a climbing technique, because in France we have a company of dancers and climbers and I knew there was a cross-over there.

RLF: I suggest you try the Tilapia, it's very nice. Maybe you need a knife to get more of this thing, but it's very nice, the Tilapia.

JF: You put yourself through this training or the astronauts?

KD: No. Not myself, not the astronauts, not a dancer - but non-dancers. Non-dancer subjects, like astronauts around 40 years old, very physical people but not professional. There was one subject who underwent the training and one subject who didn't, and we compared the behaviour of these two subjects with the help of an ethological scientist. Her conclusion was that the behaviour of the trained subject was not the same as the non-trained subject. Not like a dancer absolutely, but not the same [as a normal person]. The trained subject had found another solution to moving in this environment. But still the result of the experiment was very interesting because I was beginning to understand that there was this whole issue about the fact that when you are in weightlessness you don't need the bottom half of your body.

JF: Really?

KD: No. Because you have not the feeling of gravity. So you just move with your view, with your eyes.

JF: You become kind 'head first'?

KD: On Earth, because you have weight, because you are standing up, you need balance, and your balance is what you see with your eyes and - because of gravity - what you feel with your muscles, with your joints, with your skin, and finally what your inner ears do with these two sets of information. The inner ear correlates everything: I feel that and I see that, okay, that makes sense, everything is okay. But in weightlessness you are in sensorial conflict. Because you see some things with horizontality or verticality inside the [space] station or inside the 'plane, but you feel nothing about this notion of verticality and horizontality, there is a conflict. To find a solution about this conflict you decide, on an unconscious level, that you will follow only your vision. So, with regard to the body, what happens is that because the upper part of the body appears in your peripheral vision you know that it exists - because you see it. But you don't know that the lower part of the body exists because you don't see it.

JF: That's incredible. It's like you become the Cartesian subject.

KD: Yes, absolutely.

JF: That's very strange.

KD: Yes, but it's true. If you don't be careful, you don't know if your feet are floating all the way around until they bang you on the back of the head.

JF: But this must be very weird for a dancer. It's almost like you lose the body. What was your reaction to this?

KD: My reaction was, why we have a lot of problems with orientation in zero-g is because it's impossible, because of our corporeal-sense, our body-image, to change very suddenly from having an entire body from head to toe to only having a torso. So in weightlessness, when the bottom half of your body ceases to exist, you still carry with you your memory of it on earth, and there's a big conflict between what you have been and what you are.

JF: And being pre-conscious this isn't something you can think your way out of. It makes a demand on you all of the time.

KD: Yes. And so my idea was that we have to restore this integrited body in weightlessness, to find a subjective orientation, not a real one. And that's very complicated, you understand?

JF: Had anyone in the space industry had addressed the problem in the same way that you had?

KD: No. Because for them the goal is to be efficient. Only that, like a technological man. The goal is to do what they have to do, in the little time they have.

JF: So, to be a little more abstract about this, the astronauts were prepared to accept themselves as Cartesian subjects. They weren't reintegrating the body.

KD: That's true. They had no time for that. This is the first time that somebody asks the question of the gesture in weightlessness.

JF: It's astonishing, but completely predictable at the same time. So - one of the problems that crops up with spending long lengths of time in space has always been to prevent the wasting away of the muscles. But your work suggest that this problem may actually be a function of this very Cartesian approach?

KD: Yes. I'm sure of that.

RLF: This is the essence of Kitsou's theory. Kitsou also said something interesting to me after we met Helen Charman - that there's something about astronauts that you don't really notice, but when you've met a few, you begin to notice.

JF: The right stuff?

RLF: [laughs] Not so much the right stuff as... Kitsou, what is it, that indefinable thing about astronauts?

KD: Ah yes, well you, you have to know that with astronauts, when you ask an astronaut a question, the answer is always somehow synthetic. When you ask them about a subject that they don't know anything about, they will listen to you and at some point they will find the right question to get to the centre of the thing, and it's incredible. But it's absolutely not in their training to think about all the stuff around that question. When they return to earth, nobody asks them what they feel exactly. So they don't find the words.

RLF: The debriefing is limited to: were you sick, did you perform your functions correctly.

KD: They have to be synthetic, and to go straight for [what they perceive as] the goal. They only go to the point that they are concerned with. They are not interested in peripherals. However, I think that the kind of people who become astronauts do have a big imagination. Often they've wanted to become an astronaut since they were a little boy or a little girl, and they have to keep this desire in front of them for many many many years. And because they want to realise that dream so much, they do everything they have to do to realise it. But by the time I meet them they are already in the space agency, and so although I discuss this with them and feel that they understand what I was talking about, they can't put it into words. Because that's impossible to do in their position.

JF: What do you think of the representation of weightlessness and astronaut behavior in the film 2001?

KD: I thought a lot about this movie when I came to make a show here on Earth. Because this movie is very interesting about the representation of idea of zero-g. But it is also difficult, because in this movie there is a big idea about humanity, about what is the future of humanity and what is the story of humanity. And that is something else.

JF: Sure, and I have a lot of disagreements with the movie and its theories. But it seems to me that one thing Kubrick did understand was the need - or the temptation - when you're travelling in space, to recreate, to reproduce synthetically, the situation here on Earth. So he has scenes with people wearing velcro shoes so they can walk along the ground for example. And he seems to be pointing out that rather than adapting themselves to the new conditions, people will try and force the conditions to correspond to the demands of their limbic system, their evolved animal brain.

KD: Certainly, the [astronauts'] training encourages the mind to be synthetic and the body to be efficient. But in the shows I do on Earth, I try to to transmit to the spectator the feeling of imbalance, and I think there is in fact a lot of similarity between Earth and zero-g. My experiment in zero-g proved to me that balance doesn't exist. On Earth, we have no balance. We constantly try to achieve balance, but it is a subjective ideal, not a reality.

JF: But this is very interesting because it comes back to that Cartesian subject. It's almost as if the astronauts, the military, are taking up that ideal and trying to directly achieve it, heading for it as a goal, whereas you're saying that it's actually an illusion anyway, and we can turn this fact to our advantage in weightless conditions?

KD: I'm sure of that. I'm sure that it doesn't exist. But we need to have this idea because without it we don't know where we want to go. This is the idea of subjective verticality.

RLF: Is there a concensus on MIR about which is up and which is down? I mean, I know they sleep on the walls in MIR, Helen [Charman - the British astronaut who spent time on the Russian space station MIR] was saying that they have sleeping bags strapped to the walls and she was saying that for some reason, she didn't know why, they all get into this curled position with their heads bent and their hands up by their mouths, nodding slightly.

JF: Maybe it's something to do with the smell?

KD: Mais non, it's not that! It's if you have no support you move into the foetal position. But, because they are in the sleeping bags it's not exactly that, but something close.

RLF: But this idea of imposed up and down, I'm sure there is a consensus, have they decided to put floor things there and ceiling things there? They use the whole surface to strap objects to, but I'm sure they arrange things... Somebody told me that it's actually quite rude to approach someone upside down.

JF: There's an etiquette?

RLF: There's lots of different etiquettes. Helen Charman said you have to be quite careful when you pass somebody not to bump into them else you might send them flying, so the body space is quite different. But I also heard that, yes, you don't approach somebody upside down and say 'Oi, what are you up to?' You actually get yourself on the right axis to face them first.

JF: But does that come from the 'head first' modus operandi of the astronauts, or does it come from the deeper evolutionary structures of the brain?

KD: I think the second. Because I am a dancer! I think all your history is there in your posture, and not only yours but your ancestry, whether you come from India or America for example. And you see that whenever you see two people standing together.

JF: And so, you're going to do some more flights this summer and I understand there is some kind of completion of the project scheduled for next year. What does the rest of the project involve for you?

KD: Because when I made the flight I needed to prove that it was for the training of the astronauts, not for the dance, not for the art, at that time I had to be very timid about putting the fact that I was a dancer foremost. But I hope that with the next stage of this project I can get the scientists to realise more the interest of this project both for art and for science. And this will allow me to explore further the implications for movement, not just for a single human being or dancer, but for the relationship between two dancers: what happens when they touch together, for example. And this is very interesting because [on Earth] when you touch somebody you feel something because you feel their weight. But in weightlessness you have no weight. And so what is the feeling of contact? I don't know, I need to look further for that - and many other things besides. Because you know I think that the knowing of somebody is very much about the weight. We are not conscious of that but we live with that. And I think the consciousness of others becomes very bizarre once we have no weight, and we have to build another sort of carte, map, for recognising one another.

JF: So for you there is no immediate conclusion to this project, it is an on-going thing.

KD: Yes.

JF: So, as a final question, do you have ambitions to get yourself into orbit?

KD: Yes, absolutely. If it is possible, with pleasure. Any time, it would be okay with me.

JF: Thankyou very much. It's been delightful to meet you.

KD: Yes, it's been fun.

RLF: Anyone fancy another bottle of wine?

(A shorter version of this interview - minus all the ambient resturant info - appeared in the magazine).