‘Empress Stah in Space’ was conceived in 2006 upon the discovery of the pioneering work by the Arts Catalyst aboard parabolic zero gravity flights. Emboldened by the improbability, Empress Stah set her sights as far as they could reach and embarked on an artistic journey to make a performance in outer space.
The journey shares its name with a solo show commissioned by the Pacitti Company for the SPILL Festival of Performance and funded by the Arts Council England, in 2011, the same year that Empress Stah first experienced weightlessness aboard a parabolic flight with the Zero Gravity Corporation.
Set at the edge of chaos, the shows non-linear narrative was transcribed through trance and writing sessions between Empress Stah and the shows director, seminal body artist Ron Athey, which took place at the disused RAF Bentwaters in Suffolk, the site of the biggest, purported, UFO/Military incident in Europe.
‘Stargasm’ is an aerial circus act performed with laser beams emitting from Empress Stah’s uranus. The conception and invention of the laser butt plug can be traced directly to a failed funding application to the Wellcome Trust to charter a zero gravity fight with the Russian Space Agency and make a 3D film of Empress Stah and cult rock star Peaches, floating and crashing around inside the plane.
Peaches went on to write the track ‘Light in Places’ for Empress Stah’s ‘Stargasm’, upon being given the words Iconoclasm and Stargasm, which had beamed down via Ron Athey at Bentwaters on the day we spent channelling the unknowable mysteries.
Empress Stah is a genre defying performance artist who fuses sublime aerial artistry with provocative and thought provoking performances.