Jeanne Robinson, 1948-2010

Jeanne Robinson and Kathleen McDonagh in Zero-G / Photo by James Sposto

Jeanne Robinson / Photo by Beth Gwinn

>> by Brittany Duggan

Jeanne Robinson, writer, dancer, choreographer, lay-ordained Buddhist monk and zero-gravity dance visionary, died at Lion’s Gate Hospital in North Vancouver, BC, on May 30th at the age of sixty-two. A native of Boston, Robinson studied at the Boston Conservatory, the Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey and Erick Hawkins schools, Nikolais/Louis Dance Theatre Lab, Toronto Dance Theatre and the American Dance Festival, among others. In 1980, Robinson moved to Nova Scotia where she founded Nova Dance Theatre, one of the province’s early modern dance companies. The company became nationally recognized in 1985 when CBC devoted the final twenty minutes of its hour-long broadcast of highlights from the Dance in Canada Gala to the performance of Robinson’s FICTION. In 1987, Robinson re-located to the west coast with her daughter and husband, author Spider Robinson, with whom she co-wrote The Stardance Trilogy. A set of award-winning science fiction novels, The Stardance Trilogy led to the concept and basic principles of zero-gravity dance, a lifelong project of Robinson’s which she realized with her film Stardance. For the film, Robinson and dancer Kathleen McDonagh experimented with dancing aboard a flight by Zero Gravity, a provider of commercial weightless flights. In 1980, NASA invited Robinson to join its Civilian In Space Program to dance in space, but the Challenger explosion ended the program.