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. Along the way, campers Kate Gow and Angel Poveda Yánez reflect on what it means to be disoriented, held, and supported.

This episode of Dances with Robots is supported by The Brown Arts Institute at Brown University and is co-produced by Consciously Produced.

Visit are.na/choreographicinterfaces for the show notes to this episode.

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 question: how will we move, gather, create, and find meaning in places unlike anything we've known? Sherwood and Varmazis make the case that answering it takes more than engineers, and that artists, designers, and other students of how people actually live need a seat at the table now.

This episode of Dances with Robots is supported by The Brown Arts Institute at Brown University and is co-produced by Consciously Produced.

Visit are.na/choreographicinterfaces for this episode's show notes.

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 rotating room and its Multi-Axes Rotation and Tilt Device (MART), where subjects are spun and tilted until their sense of orientation gives out, through motion sickness, artificial gravity, and aerospace medicine, a field where research done for astronauts also reaches people on the ground who have lost their balance.

This episode of Dances with Robots is supported by The Brown Arts Institute at Brown University and is co-produced by Consciously Produced.

Visit are.na/choreographicinterfaces for this episode's show notes.

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 performance, Nahum and Whitson work in a longer lineage of artists who insist that story can be told otherwise: that a future off-planet could be built on care, imagination, and collective responsibility rather than conquest.

This episode of Dances with Robots is supported by The Brown Arts Institute at Brown University and is co-produced by Consciously Produced.

Visit are.na/choreographicinterfaces for the show notes to this episode.

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, founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI); choreographer Kitsou Dubois; and planetary scientist Adeene Denton, she asks what artists, choreographers, and movers bring to these conversations.

This episode of Dances with Robots is supported by The Brown Arts Institute at Brown University, and is co-produced by Consciously Produced.

Visit are.na/choreographicinterfaces for the show notes to this episode.

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 challenge. It's a social, cultural, and deeply human one.

Dances with Robots is supported by The Brown Arts Institute at Brown University and is co-produced by Consciously Produced.

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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 https://www.are.na/choreographicinterfaces

Like, subscribe, and review here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dances-with-robots/id1715669152

Hear more from Sydney and Sarah via ON TAP: A Theatre and Performance Studies Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/on-tap-065/id1081517199?i=1000621205821

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.

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 https://www.are.na/choreographicinterfaces 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.

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 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.

Sydney Skybetter discusses some of the core theories that he teaches at Brown. Turns out, what works in the dance studio doesn't always work in the real world.

See featured guests, read the transcript, and more in our archives at https://www.are.na/choreographicinterfaces/dwr-ep-9-turning-the-tables

Like, subscribe, and review here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dances-with-robots/id1715669152

Key Takeaways from Episode 9:

1.Artists can use their implication in institutions to effect change from within.

2.It is important to be conscious of the compromises and power dynamics involved in working with emerging technology.

3.Technology is not neutral and often reflects the biases and limitations of its creators.

4. The history of surveillance and racial discrimination is embedded in our technologies and institutions.

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.