Dragan Živadinov's Zero-Gravity Theatre

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss the idea of creating a zero-gravity theatre, pioneered by Dragan Živadinov, a Slovenian conceptual artist. In order to do so, the author turns to Russian philosophical (N. Fyodorov, K. Tsiolkovsky, A Chizhevsky) and artistic sources (K. Malevich), as well as the space exploration envisioned by Slovenian scientist Herman Potocnik Noordung, who influenced Živadinov's cosmokinetic art. Resisting the legacy of cosmists and supremacists, Živadinov designs his objectless antimimetic theatre with a void actor, freed from weight and expected to be replaced by a technical substitute, which emits the actor’s memory from near-equatorial orbit. This article examines the foundations of post-gravity theatre, which are based on three algorithms with the digital memory of the actor: biological (recording of body coordinates), biographical (recording of professional biography), and biomechatronic (recording of genetic structure). These will be controlled by the “umbot” both on stage and in space after the death of the actors. The author focuses on the Biomechanics Noordung production, performed in the stratosphere on board an IL‑76 MDK aircraft. Due to sudden free-fall moments, the performers experienced a state of weightlessness, interpreted as a rehearsal for the future liberation of the body from gravity. In conditions which made it possible to create a dozen modes of weightlessness, the actors could perform in a state of levitation, which was perceived as a unique abstract theatrical performance. Combining Meyerhold’s theory of biomechanics, conceived in the 1920s as a system of exercises for the actor’s body, with Noordung’s research on gravity and ways to overcome it, represented by drawings of a rotating space station, Živadinov realised the idea of theatricalising the cosmos. With this performance, Živadinov shows that an abstract work of art can become truly abstract only if it triumphs over gravity, i. e. if it loses its gravitational orientation (up, down, left, right) and manifests itself in zero gravity.