Stand of the Sun
An immersive solstice ritual for the melting metropolis, where environmental history meets the wonder of celestial interconnectedness.
Stand of the Sun is a performance exploring humanity’s relationship with the hot heart of our solar system. Activating the sculpture My Body is a Sundial through music, spoken word, dance and lighting, it interweaves historical and community stories of extreme heat with mythology and artistic inquiry, embarking on an embodied conversation between star and human.
Travelling through time and space, from deep-time beginnings to the present-day metropolis, Stand of the Sun tilts closer to our closest star to wonder, what does it feel like to move through our over-heating cities and heat-stroked bodies? How does the sun experience our over-heating world? What would it say to humanity today, if only we could listen?
At its heart, this multi-disciplinary storytelling experience offers a new solstice ritual for urbanites amid climate chaos, creating space to process uncanny, shifting, sensorial and emotional qualities to our ancient, celestial relationship with the sun. Body-time and solar-time converge to stir empathy for an entity so different to ourselves, yet intertwined with our fate. Immersive lighting and harmonic invocations inspired by nature surface inequities baked into the fabric of our cities. Composite storytelling challenges modern-day understandings of resilience. Choreography inspired by Western and Caribbean flow invites audiences, artists and academics to wonder together: what wisdom(s) might emerge from an embodied attentiveness to broader definitions of community?
Stand of the Sun was commissioned by Melting Metropolis, a Wellcome Discovery Award project at the University of Liverpool and Queens College, City University of New York.
Written and directed by Bryony Ella, Research Artist at Melting Metropolis, the work evolved across a three-year collaborative process involving community groups and stakeholders, creative practitioners and academics, in response to new research into sensorial and lived experiences of urban heat islands London, Paris, New York and Port of Spain.
Performances & screenings
2026 g39 with Artangel and Abi Palmer, Cardiff (performance with Q&A)
2026 Solutions House, Climate Action Week, supported by Wellcome with Futerra, London (performance with Q&A)
2026 Summer Solstice Festival, Saatchi Gallery London, 2026 (performance), London
2026 Somewhere the Sun is Shining, Melting Metropolis (screening with Q&A), London
2025 Richmond Arts and Ideas Festival, Orleans House Gallery, (performance & symposium), London
2025 Public Engagement in Environmental History: European Society of Environmental History, (screening with Q&A) Uppsala, Sweden
Creative Team
Alleyne Dance: Choreography, dance
Andrea Lepori: Sound engineer
Antoine Marc: Choreography, dance
Aron Kyne: Sound design
Austin Tang: Lighting technician
Bryony Ella: Writer, director, spoken word (Human)
Bumi Thomas: Composer, vocals, spoken word (Sun)
Carlene Etienne: Steel pan, oversize side drum
Clare Hirst: Flute, saxophone
Cosimo Keita: Percussion
Elixir: Sound healing, ambient soundscape
Emmanuel Clem: Vocals
Han Sayles: Production electrician
Kieron Daniel: Cello
Joanna Penso: Producer
Max Rademacher: Ngoni, vocals, guitar
Miles Danso: Upright bass
Olia Poliakova: Dance
Pharoah Russell: Musical director, drums
Rachel Sampley: Lighting design
Renako McDonald: Dance
Robert Dunkley-Gyimah: Dance
Rose Aida Sall Sao: Dance
Seren Kapor: Cello
Tomi Allen-Nurse: Jewellery design intern
Vincenzo Capodivento: Sound engineer
Zamar-Eden Sam-Jolly: Vocals
Responses
This was a seminal moment… Deeply connecting me to place, to the sun, to community… Synchronised, powerful, beautiful.
Absolutely superb, and surprising… It was very engaging on many levels. The performance and musicians carried you along on what seemed a journey. At times one of tiredness, at others full of vibrancy. As a way to engage people, to try to get them to reflect, I thought it was excellent.
The movement, the music, the artwork – it was incredible. I felt the journey, it was amazing. It’s not often you get those three things together and the whole is more than its parts, it was wonderful. I felt it, I could relate to it, it reaffirmed my feelings about heat.
Mesmerising, immersive, life-affirming… I found it thought-provoking and therapeutic… I actually cried!
I thought it was very moving, very provocative and emotional at times. It particularly made you think about vulnerable people and their experience of heat.
It was very moving, creative, dynamic, there were a lot of moving parts and they were synchronised with one another; there were periods of activity with calm to regain your energy. it definitely made heat more prominent in my mind as something to think about and how others experience it differently. You think of heat as something that happens to you instead of something that is captured by you and the words of the poetry and the dancers illuminated this phenomenon to me.
The movement, the music, the artwork – it was incredible. I felt the journey, it was amazing. It’s not often you get those three things together and the whole is more than its parts, it was wonderful. I felt it, I could relate to it, it reaffirmed my feelings about heat.
The performance, the lights and the music, “focused you into the sculpture”… It was amazing, rhythmic – mesmeric. Spiritual.
Melting Metropolis is supported by a Wellcome Discovery Award, grant number 225843/Z/22/Z.
Photography by Alberto Romano, 2025 and Arron Leppard, 2026
Stand of the Sun
An immersive solstice ritual for the melting metropolis, where environmental history meets the wonder of celestial interconnectedness.
Stand of the Sun is a performance exploring humanity’s relationship with the hot heart of our solar system. Activating the sculpture My Body is a Sundial through music, spoken word, dance and lighting, it interweaves historical and community stories of extreme heat with mythology and artistic inquiry, embarking on an embodied conversation between star and human.
Travelling through time and space, from deep-time beginnings to the present-day metropolis, Stand of the Sun tilts closer to our closest star to wonder, what does it feel like to move through our over-heating cities and heat-stroked bodies? How does the sun experience our over-heating world? What would it say to humanity today, if only we could listen?
At its heart, this multi-disciplinary storytelling experience offers a new solstice ritual for urbanites amid climate chaos, creating space to process uncanny, shifting, sensorial and emotional qualities to our ancient, celestial relationship with the sun. Body-time and solar-time converge to stir empathy for an entity so different to ourselves, yet intertwined with our fate. Immersive lighting and harmonic invocations inspired by nature surface inequities baked into the fabric of our cities. Composite storytelling challenges modern-day understandings of resilience. Choreography inspired by Western and Caribbean flow invites audiences, artists and academics to wonder together: what wisdom(s) might emerge from an embodied attentiveness to broader definitions of community?
Stand of the Sun was commissioned by Melting Metropolis, a Wellcome Discovery Award project at the University of Liverpool and Queens College, City University of New York.
Written and directed by Bryony Ella, Research Artist at Melting Metropolis, the work evolved across a three-year collaborative process involving community groups and stakeholders, creative practitioners and academics, in response to new research into sensorial and lived experiences of urban heat islands London, Paris, New York and Port of Spain.
Performances & screenings
2026 g39 with Artangel and Abi Palmer, Cardiff (performance with Q&A)
2026 Solutions House, Climate Action Week, supported by Wellcome with Futerra, London (performance with Q&A)
2026 Summer Solstice Festival, Saatchi Gallery London, 2026 (performance), London
2026 Somewhere the Sun is Shining, Melting Metropolis (screening with Q&A), London
2025 Richmond Arts and Ideas Festival, Orleans House Gallery, (performance & symposium), London
2025 Public Engagement in Environmental History: European Society of Environmental History, (screening with Q&A) Uppsala, Sweden
Creative Team
Alleyne Dance: Choreography, dance
Andrea Lepori: Sound engineer
Antoine Marc: Choreography, dance
Aron Kyne: Sound design
Austin Tang: Lighting technician
Bryony Ella: Writer, director, spoken word (Human)
Bumi Thomas: Composer, vocals, spoken word (Sun)
Carlene Etienne: Steel pan, oversize side drum
Clare Hirst: Flute, saxophone
Cosimo Keita: Percussion
Elixir: Sound healing, ambient soundscape
Emmanuel Clem: Vocals
Han Sayles: Production electrician
Kieron Daniel: Cello
Joanna Penso: Producer
Max Rademacher: Ngoni, vocals, guitar
Miles Danso: Upright bass
Olia Poliakova: Dance
Pharoah Russell: Musical director, drums
Rachel Sampley: Lighting design
Renako McDonald: Dance
Robert Dunkley-Gyimah: Dance
Rose Aida Sall Sao: Dance
Seren Kapor: Cello
Tomi Allen-Nurse: Jewellery design intern
Vincenzo Capodivento: Sound engineer
Zamar-Eden Sam-Jolly: Vocals
Responses
This was a seminal moment… Deeply connecting me to place, to the sun, to community… Synchronised, powerful, beautiful.
Absolutely superb, and surprising… It was very engaging on many levels. The performance and musicians carried you along on what seemed a journey. At times one of tiredness, at others full of vibrancy. As a way to engage people, to try to get them to reflect, I thought it was excellent.
The movement, the music, the artwork – it was incredible. I felt the journey, it was amazing. It’s not often you get those three things together and the whole is more than its parts, it was wonderful. I felt it, I could relate to it, it reaffirmed my feelings about heat.
Mesmerising, immersive, life-affirming… I found it thought-provoking and therapeutic… I actually cried!
I thought it was very moving, very provocative and emotional at times. It particularly made you think about vulnerable people and their experience of heat.
It was very moving, creative, dynamic, there were a lot of moving parts and they were synchronised with one another; there were periods of activity with calm to regain your energy. it definitely made heat more prominent in my mind as something to think about and how others experience it differently. You think of heat as something that happens to you instead of something that is captured by you and the words of the poetry and the dancers illuminated this phenomenon to me.
The movement, the music, the artwork – it was incredible. I felt the journey, it was amazing. It’s not often you get those three things together and the whole is more than its parts, it was wonderful. I felt it, I could relate to it, it reaffirmed my feelings about heat.
The performance, the lights and the music, “focused you into the sculpture”… It was amazing, rhythmic – mesmeric. Spiritual.
Melting Metropolis is supported by a Wellcome Discovery Award, grant number 225843/Z/22/Z.
Photography by Alberto Romano, 2025 and Arron Leppard, 2026
