In Maria Hassabi's CANCELLED, four female performers move through a soundscape that emphasizes an endless lifespan. The choreography, showcasing Hassabi's signature style of stillness and deceleration, displays representational female poses based on mannerisms throughout history. Verticality and frontality create a sense of resistance both as a metaphor and as a reality, reflecting on ideas related to the work's title. This meticulously crafted piece evokes and questions the subtle interchanges of power between subjects.

Since the early 2000s, Hassabi has developed a unique artistic practice that focuses on the relationship between the live body, the still image, and the sculptural object. Her works examine concepts of time and the human figure, utilizing a variety of media to emphasize the complexity of formal organization. Often the performing body is embedded within imposing installations, and through the meticulous crafting of material - every action, even the gaze, is subject to counts and cues - a negotiation between the body's relation to gravity, time, and space reveals the physical side effects of labor, anchoring both dancers' and viewers' awareness to the present moment. The initial invitation of a spectacle exhausts itself, exposing a common corporeality and radical intimacy.