STASIS

Best of #9

Performers in a garden location. Audience visible in background

Performer with large hat viewed through gap in audience

Audience members viewing a performance in a garden location with grass and flowers. Performers visible in the background

A blurred image of a person with blonde hair, liftining their right hand above their head. Their face is obscured.

A blurred image of a knife in a sheath around a person's leg, there is a hand holding the knife's handle.

A blurred, overlapping image of a person with blonde hair which is tied back, they have flowers near their mouth and head.

Best of #9 is a performance by the collective STASIS, commissioned to mark the opening of SWG3’s garden space. Devised and performed in situ, the work features Isabel Palmstierna, Aniela Piasecka and Paloma Proudfoot, with Jordan Pilling and original music by Ailie Ormston.

STASIS sits between the disciplines of dance, performance, theatre and live art, exploring and expressing the performers’ creative understandings and experiences of gender. The group are drawn to transforming non-performative spaces into temporary stages, playing with both the lo-fi and the maximal, creating works that self-consciously seduce, surprise, morph and change. Best of #9 is soundtracked by Scandinavian electro, 1980s house music, faux historical classical music and an original composition by Ailie. It is a celebratory work that also features a bespoke ‘cake-hat’, created by Jordan.

Best of #9 is the latest in a series of Best of works by STASIS. This series represents a performance methodology that takes inspiration from the concept of greatest hits compilation albums by successful music megastars. Each new edition of Best of cannibalises the so-called best moments of past performances, remixing and adapting them into new material as an irreverent and humoristic exercise in self-canonisation.