Miami-based Natasha Tsakos will take a bold step toward a vision she’s nurtured for years: bringing theatrical performance into zero gravity and simulating space as an essential part of human flourishing beyond Earth.
Aboard a zero-gravity aircraft, she will stage “Paraboles,” the first full-scale multimedia performance conceived for microgravity, which will unfold across 25 parabolic areas, each offering 22 seconds of weightlessness. She and three performers will engage in the parabolic flight, where an aircraft is flown in a series of arcs that create brief periods of weightlessness. As the aircraft free-falls, the results are a temporary state of reduced or zero gravity. Looking ahead, says Tsakos, this will be training for performances for future places in space, where gravity conditions are different than on Earth.
The project, currently in its final rehearsal phase, was developed in collaboration with MIT’s Space Exploration Initiative and its the Initiative that will work out the details as to where the launch will take place.
Locally, Live Arts Miami offered training facilities, and O Cinema, which provided space for virtual reality simulation and is also a presenting venue partner.
Tsakos and her collaborators, alumni of Cirque du Soleil, NASA, and National Geographic, will explore how movement, narrative, and film production adapt when gravity disappears, while asking a question that feels increasingly resonant: what kind of culture will we carry with us as we venture beyond Earth?
Tsakos, originally from Geneva, but now based in Miami, hesitates to call herself an artist – she’s more of a showmaker, she concludes.
“Showmaking gives me room to create all kinds of adventures,” says Tsakos. Her multimedia theatrical works often blend movement, animation, and sound, ranging from techno-theater pieces at Miami Light Project to an eco-opera that opened the 2012 G20 Summit in Los Cabos, Mexico.
The course shifted in 2009, when Patricia Cowings, Ph.D., a NASA psychophysiologist, recruited Tsakos for a lunar-gravity flight. Training at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and floating alongside astronauts, Tsakos felt what she calls “another level of presence and work ethic.”
A self-exercise at Singularity University, a Silicon Valley-based think tank and education hub, made her realize that she was someone who makes short shows for space. Naming the goal crystallized it and set her on a deliberate path toward its realization.
The conceptual framework for “Paraboles” is a counterpoint between holding on and letting go, explains Tsakos.
Three performers clutch battered suitcases—symbols of memory, identity, and attachment—as they move between hypergravity, when gravity nearly doubles, and microgravity, when it disappears. The narrative is purposefully distilled to anchor performers amid the sensory disorientation.
“Hypergravity is dramaturgically just as interesting as microgravity,” says Tsakos. “It’s a dance between contraction and release, certainty and possibility.”
Lead choreographer and performance researcher Luis Alberto Cuevas—a New World School of the Arts alumni whose résumé spans Rosie Herrera Dance Theater to HBO’s “David Makes Man”—is charged with translating metaphor into motion.
“Dancers have an intimate relationship with gravity,” he explains. “A pirouette begins with your center, spiraling around the foot that holds you to the ground. Take gravity away, and you lose that anchor. So we have to look elsewhere—maybe a harness, maybe a chair, maybe the cabin ceiling—to find new points of rotation, new ways the body can turn through space.”
Cuevas envisions a sitcom-style setup, with three cameras capturing each 22-second phrase from different angles to minimize the need for retakes.
“We want to capture different points in space at the same time,” he explains, acknowledging the unpredictable effects of weightlessness on timing and movement. Cuevas is exploring a hybrid approach: part green screen, part physical set allowing editors to later blend real objects with digital environments in post-production. “There’s no real precedent,” Cuevas admits, “which makes it thrilling. We’re setting the rubric for whoever comes next.”
For him, the timing is political as well as technical. Florida’s recent elimination of arts funding, he says, underscores why artists must make bold, visible choices. “The only way to combat the desire to dissolve art is by making the choice to create—by taking it where art isn’t expected, like microgravity.”
Scientific rigor is woven just as tightly into the project. Yvette Gonzalez, MPH—bioastronautics officer, opera singer, and advocate for Indigenous STEM access—oversees the project’s human-subject protocols. Each performer will wear a sensor-laden vest used in suborbital missions, which will record heart rate, blood-oxygen levels, and vestibular responses before, during, and after the flight.
“Microgravity is really a spectrum of free fall,” explains Gonzalez, currently based in Arizona. “We want to know: Are artists better off, worse off, or simply different in that environment?” Multiple baseline sessions such as treadmill walks help establish individual norms. Spikes or dips in flight will then reveal whether the body is responding to stress, adrenaline, or some yet-unknown factor of weightlessness.
Lessons from cave analogs and the Polaris Dawn mission shape her safety approach: small doses of anti-nausea medication, fixed gaze points to calm the inner ear, and thoughtful sensor placement that won’t disrupt the choreography’s visual language. “A bulky headband won’t do,” says Gonzalez with a laugh. “Finger sensors capture oxygen data without ruining the shot.”
Between now and October, Tsakos’s five-member performance team will cycle through wind-tunnel drills (to master subtle shifts of center of gravity), underwater sessions, VR rehearsals, and even aerobatic flights in XL-300 aircraft capable of six-g maneuvers. All told, the preparation will take 15 days. “(American rock band) OK Go filmed its zero g video after 21 flights and no formal training,” notes Tsakos. “We’re doing fine.”
Still, the greatest unknown is the human nervous system. “Floating isn’t what makes people sick,” explains Gonzalez. “It’s the rapid switch from 0 g to 2 g and back.” The body doesn’t have time to adjust—it reacts to the sudden shifts. Cuevas, however, is optimistic. Performers, he says, may adapt more easily than tourists. “We live in our bodies. Kinesthetic awareness is half our job.”
Tsakos says Miami provides the perfect setting for the creation of the work, partly because she lives here, but also because the city’s eccentricity and cross-cultural energy are embedded in the work. Local partners like Live Arts Miami and O Cinema help anchor a project that could easily drift into pure spectacle.
“Miami inspires me even when I’m just staring at my laptop,” says Tsakos. “There’s a freedom to be, and room to make.” That creative openness, she argues, makes the city an ideal test site for culture-driven futurism.
There are plans for “Paraboles” to premiere as an art film, immersive installation, and documentary. Tsakos hopes audiences will experience the visceral thrill of weightlessness, and leave asking a deeper question. As space shifts from the realm of engineers to a frontier for private industry, and as everyday people, not just astronauts, begin to leave Earth, what traces of humanity will we take with us?
For Tsakos, the answer lies in reverence. “Artists remind us of wonder. That wonder has to travel, or the journey isn’t worth it.”
Cuevas answers pragmatically: “We’ll take culture no matter what. Humans share stories of how to hunt, how to survive. That’s art.”
For Gonzalez, it’s also about rethinking how knowledge is handled. “Different cultures teach and value knowledge differently,” she says. “For ‘Paraboles,’ that means ensuring our methods respect the performers, that the data aren’t hoarded, and that the story remains accessible and human.”
Whether ten minutes of free fall can seed a new artistic frontier remains to be seen. But by launching themselves and their suitcases of metaphor into the sky, Tsakos and her team stake a claim: the next giant leap for humankind should make room for wonder.
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