Analogy between training for dancers and problems of adjustment to microgravity: an evaluation of the subjective...

"Moderne dance" (as opposed to a more academic or classical dance form) uses techniques from kinesiology, anatomy and improvization which are adapted to a cultural, technological and political environment. The function of a choreographic system is to take and give a measure of the world. This includes, with the present tendency of the evolution of culture, a new "naturalism" which seeks the secrets of the body. Dance movements express in terms of space the dimension fo the infinite. It gives somehow the measure of a world within which everything is relative. Except for the speed of light, time and space are bound together by the same principle. The qualities of body awareness and specific motricity in dancers imply--besides a strict discipline--balance, coordination, muscular performance and perfect orientation, problems that astronauts also encounter in microgravity. Could chosen exercises used in modern dance technique be applied to the training of astronauts? Dancer-choreographer Kitsou Dubois has been working in this direction since 1988. She was granted a "Villa Medicis Hors Les Murs" by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to carry on with her research at NASA, Houston, Tex. in April 1989. It allowed her to investigate the reality of this analogy. She intends to evaluate the dancers' subjective vertical refering to Mittelstaedt's observations on the proportional relationship between "space sickness" and some astronauts poor evaluation of the subjective vertical. This study should create a relationship between a choreographer's empirical intuition and a scientific reality.