If you wanted to head to space, dancers probably wouldn’t be among the first experts you’d consult. But Sydney Skybetter, founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces, thinks they should be. “As commercial space travel scales up, as space stations and lunar habitats get built, someone’s going to have to think about how those human bodies move and orient and interact in those environments—and I think that should be dance artists,” he says. Right now, he points out, the future of human movement beyond Earth is being designed almost entirely by billionaires and government entities. “These are not folks thinking about bodies with the same rigor or care or equity consciousness as dancers,” he says.
That’s why this year’s theme for CRCI is “Space Camp.” The annual conference always brings together a wildly diverse group of scientists, artists, and other kinds of thinkers to explore how choreographic intelligence can inform emerging technologies. The 2026 iterationtaking place March 17–19 in Brooklyn, New York, will explore how dance principles can impact how humans move in space.
The idea grew out of CRCI’s 2025 immersive residency exploring dance in microgravity. Originally, the plan was to send CRCI’s four resident artists (Laila J. Franklin, Michael Figueroa, Sasha Peterson, and Kate Gow) on a parabolic flight this year. But the primary company that operates those flights in the U.S. paused operations, so Space Camp was partially a way to reallocate that budget, explains Ariane Michaud, whose company Consciously Produced produces CRCI.
At the same time, the resident artists felt that, before investing in a flight, they wanted to experiment more on the ground. In particular, they asked to collaborate with STREB, known for its (literally) high-flying acrobatics. Space Camp will offer daily workshops at STREB’s facilities on the company’s signature PopAction technique, plus trampoline and trapeze skills. Participants will also get to improv inside of floatation tanks, using the salted water to explore movement while experiencing a sense of weightlessness.
Bringing dancers to the extraterrestrial conversation isn’t just about movement, though. It’s also a way of imagining what it means to bring all kinds of cultures to space. “We are getting told a certain kind of story about what space is, why it matters, whose culture gets to go there,” Skybetter says. “This is a moment to radically recenter how we understand space.” With that in mind, Space Camp includes a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to visit an Afrofuturist period room; an improvisation-based workshop, led by Franklin and informed by queer Black underground nightlife and Afrofuturist principles, looking at bringing “the club” to space; and conversations covering topics like the ethics of bodies in outer space, led by facilitator Adeene Denton, who’s both a planetary scientist and a dance artist.
The goal? “I want dancers to have a real seat at the table for how space culture gets built—not as an afterthought, but as experts whose embodied knowledge fundamentally shapes how humans move, express, and take care of each other in these new environments,” Skybetter says. “Space Camp is, hopefully, building the expertise in the community for those future jobs.”
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