Outer space, aliens, art: 3 reasons why ArtScience Museum’s new show is out of this world. By Mayo Martin
SINGAPORE: In 1999, Slovenian director Dragan Zivadinov literally took his art to greater heights. The stratosphere, to be exact.
Inside a special aircraft used to simulate zero gravity conditions for training cosmonauts and astronauts, his company shot straight up and plummeted down 15 times to perform the world’s first weightless theatre performance over Moscow.
The theatre director, who had been a cosmonaut candidate under the Russian space programme Roscosmos, recalled: “Each time, you had 25 seconds of zero gravity (coming down). During the last one, the seatbelts in the chairs for audiences and theatre critics were unbuckled, and they also floated along with the actors. Every critic had a special pocket for puking, so if they became ill, they could just puke in it so they won’t destroy the performance!”
Zivadinov isn’t content with just performing in the stratosphere. One of his long-term theatre projects aims to eventually be able to launch 14 performers – or at least an “artistic satellite” representing each one – in orbit by 2045.
Image: Jules de Balincourt, Space Investors, 2015. © the artist.
