Houston, We Have a People Problem | Learning to Live Together in Space
Dances with Robots
What will it actually take to live in space? Better rockets are only part of the answer. In this episode, Ariane Michaud explores the human side of space exploration: trust, adaptability, care, conflict, and the challenge of building a future with people whose experiences and priorities may be very different from our own. Through For All Mankind, NASA's research on isolated crews, and the history of women in space, Ariane traces how assumptions about gender, culture, and power get built into the things we send up, from spacesuits to docking systems to the Golden Record. Marie-Pier Boucher,...
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Falling to Fly: Space Camp for Artists
Dances with Robots
Before you can fly, you have to learn to fall. In March 2026, CRCI gathered dancers, artists, and embodied researchers for Space Camp, an experiment in what moving bodies might bring to humanity's future off Earth. Guest host Fynn Kugel takes us inside: tumbling onto crash mats and swinging from trapezes at STREB Extreme Action, asking whether space can be explored without repeating settler-colonial frameworks with Adeene Denton, floating in isolation tanks and a saltwater pool with physicist and microgravity researcher Adam Dipert, and dancing All Aboard the Mothership with Laila Franklin....
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How will we live in outer space? | Tourism, Sex, and Culture in Zero G
Dances with Robots
Getting to space is an engineering problem. Living there is a design problem. In Episode 4 of Dances with Robots, host Ariane Michaud sets the rocketry aside and asks what an ordinary day off Earth might look like. Her guides are space architect Brent Sherwood and space journalist Maria Varmazis, who chart an industry in transition: from astronauts on research missions to paying tourists, and eventually to people who intend to stay. The conversation ranges from space hotels and microgravity spas (and yes, sex in zero G) to cooking, movement, beauty, and art. Underneath all of it is a harder...
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Which Way Is Down? | How The Body Adapts In Space
Dances with Robots
How do our bodies adapt to an environment they were never designed for? In Episode 3 of Dances with Robots, host Ariane Michaud takes up one of the hardest problems of living beyond Earth: what microgravity does to the human body. She talks with Janna Kaplan and Vivek Pandey Vimal, researchers at the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory at Brandeis, while CRCI student associate Rishika Kartik speaks with aspiring aerospace physician Gitika Gorthi about how people relearn to move, balance, and care for their bodies without a reliable sense of down. The conversation runs from the lab's...
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Who Is Space For? | Conquest, Care, and the Future Off-Earth
Dances with Robots
Who gets to imagine humanity's future beyond Earth, and who gets left out? In Episode 2 of Dances with Robots, host Ariane Michaud sits down with Nahum, artist and founder of the Kosmica Institute, and interdisciplinary artist Sage Ni'Ja Whitson to pose a question the space sector rarely asks of itself: not why we go, but who the going is for. Space has always had gatekeepers. From the agencies and billionaires who set the agenda to the cultural assumptions we pack along with the cargo, the story of leaving Earth has mostly been written by a very few. Engaging with Afrofuturism and speculative...
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Brave New Worlds | Why Should Dancers Go to Space?
Dances with Robots
What do dancers have to do with the future of space exploration? This season explores how movement research informs life in microgravity, how choreography structures astronaut training, and what happens when questions of access, capitalism, and imagination extend beyond Earth. If outer space is part of our shared future, who gets to shape it, who gets access, and what, if anything, can artists do about it? In the Season 2 premiere of Dances with Robots, host Ariane Michaud begins an eight-episode journey into the intersection of dance, embodiment, and outer space. Joined by Sydney Skybetter,...
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Season Two is About to Launch
Dances with Robots
We were taught that space belongs to astronauts, engineers, and billionaires. But if space is part of all our futures, then who gets to shape it should belong to all of us. So what, if anything, can dancers do about it? In Season Two of Dances with Robots, host Ariane Michaud follows that question through conversations with astronauts, scientists, engineers, architects, journalists, and artists, exploring what happens when dance and embodied knowledge enter the conversation about space, technology, and the future. Along the way, one thing becomes clear: space isn't only a technological...
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A Conversation with Sarah Bay-Cheng
Dances with Robots
Sydney Skybetter sits down with Dr. Sarah Bay-Cheng, a performance studies professor, scholar, and Dean at York University in Toronto, Canada. They discuss their shared expertise in deaning, puppetry, and the COVID moment. Read the transcript, and more in our archives at Like, subscribe, and review here: Hear more from Sydney and Sarah via ON TAP: A Theatre and Performance Studies Podcast: The Dances with Robots Team Host: Sydney Skybetter Co-Host & Executive Producer: Ariane Michaud Archivist and Web Designer: Kate Gow Podcasting Consultant: Megan Hall Accessibility...
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This One's for the Dancers
Dances with Robots
Sydney and Ariane showcase two groups of artists leading the way in combining technology with the performing arts. Sydney talks with choreographer Bill T. Jones, while Ariane chats with dancers Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson. See featured guests, read the transcript, and more in our archives at Like, subscribe, and review here: The Dances with Robots Team Host: Sydney Skybetter Co-Host & Executive Producer: Ariane Michaud Archivist and Web Designer: Kate Gow Podcasting Consultant: Megan Hall Accessibility Consultant: Laurel Lawson Music: Kamala Sankaram Audio Production...
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Code Switch: A Conversation with Raja Feather Kelly
Dances with Robots
Sydney Skybetter sits down with artist Raja Feather Kelly to talk about his work in live performance. The two consider airport security and the end of the world, and Raja shares how his personal experiences and creative work shape one another. About Raja: Choreographer/Director Raja Feather Kelly is the artistic director of dance-theatre-media company the feath3r theory (founded in 2009). In 2018 the feath3r theory merged with New Brooklyn Theatre. Raja has been awarded a Creative Capital Award (2019), a National Dance Project Production Grant (2019), a Breakout Award from the...
info_outlineSydney Skybetter sits down with artist Raja Feather Kelly to talk about his work in live performance. The two consider airport security and the end of the world, and Raja shares how his personal experiences and creative work shape one another.
About Raja:
Choreographer/Director Raja Feather Kelly is the artistic director of dance-theatre-media company the feath3r theory (founded in 2009). In 2018 the feath3r theory merged with New Brooklyn Theatre. Raja has been awarded a Creative Capital Award (2019), a National Dance Project Production Grant (2019), a Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (2018), Dance Magazine's inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018), the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016), and is a three-time Princess Grace Award winner (2017, 2018, 2019). He was born in Fort Hood, Texas and holds a B.A. in Dance and English from Connecticut College.
Read the transcript, and find more resources in our archive: https://www.are.na/choreographicinterfaces/dwr-ep-10-code-switch-a-conversation-with-raja-feather-kelly
Like, subscribe, and review here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dances-with-robots/id1715669152
The Dances with Robots Team
Host: Sydney Skybetter
Co-Host & Executive Producer: Ariane Michaud
Archivist and Web Designer: Kate Gow
Podcasting Consultant: Megan Hall
Accessibility Consultant: Laurel Lawson
Music: Kamala Sankaram
Audio Production Consultant: Jim Moses
Assistant Editor: Andrew Zukoski
Student Associate: Rishika Kartik
About CRCI
The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI) explores the braid of choreography, computation and surveillance through an interdisciplinary lens. Find out more at www.choreographicinterfaces.org
Brown University's Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies' Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces thanks the Marshall Woods Lectureships Foundation of Fine Arts, the Brown Arts Institute, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for their generous support of this project.
The Brown Arts Institute and the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies are part of the Perelman Arts District.