Work of Act (GbR) is a production platform for contemporary choreographic
projects by Fabrice Mazliah and May Zarhy in Frankfurt / Main, Germany.
Evolving from their former collective mamaza, the artists initiated this new structure,
where they explore and develop choreographic practices in dialogue with a network of creators of various disciplines.
Their projects are produced and disseminated in cooperation with local and international partner organisations and venues. In addition
to stage productions, Fabrice and May initiate innovative exchange and mediation formats,
as well as interventions in public spaces, developed for and with the residents of
Frankfurt and other places around the world. Both artists are regularly involved in sharing their artistic practices through workshops and teaching.
May and Fabrice have been collaborating since 2009, sharing thoughts, ideas and practices.
Work of Act is funded by the City of Frankfurt Department of Culture and currently supported by Dachverband Tanz Deutschland with funding from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Fabrice Mazliah
Fabrice Mazliah is a choreographer and performer based in Frankfurt / Main. Having
collaborated and produced works with the Forsythe Company until its closure, Fabrice
has initiated a long-term research into the embodied knowledge and heritage inscribed
into practitioners in the field. He is interested in understanding and renegotiating
the relationship between our environment, its objects, its atmospheres, and our bodies,
ourselves and its potentialities.
In his works, he regularly places the role of the receiver/perceiver in the centre of
attention and celebrates the richness of possible perspectives that can be embodied
on stage. He is interested in combining movement with language in developing new forms
of narrativity and poetry.
About Fabrice
May Zarhy
As a choreographer and dancer, May Zarhy’s work is located in between places: between
Germany and Israel, between choreography and other artistic disciplines. She creates
zones in which the spectator is asked to negotiate and suspend his*her interpretation
of what they witness: a dance performance or a music concert? An educational event or
a performative one?
May is specifically fascinated with the relationship between the medium of dance
and music. Questioning what the act of listening could be and look like is the core
motivation for her artistic practice, manifested in her way of creating, collaborating,
curating and teaching. She treats the body as the departure point for experimentation,
and movement as the motor for imagination, while acknowledging the specificity of her
own body and identity: a female, woman, Israeli European, cross-cultural, secular,
Western, artist, human (among other things...). Her practice is a constant re-positioning
and negotiation with the context in which she operates, creates and lives in.
She perceives her work as a spectrum where one form transforms into another, one that
functions as a bridge between colliding views, rather than finite territorial separations.
About May
History
Work of Act is the new platform and home for the collaboration between May and Fabrice.
Their collaboration started in 2009 within the company MAMAZA that was originally founded by Fabrice Mazliah, Ioannis Mandafounis
and May Zarhy. In 2012-2014 MAMAZA were resident artists at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt
(Doppelpass Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation). Since 2015, the first the organization
is run by Fabrice Mazliah and May Zarhy.
Out of the long-time collective artistic process of Fabrice and May the structure
has developed into a double-choreographer organizational model, which allows the
reinforcement of each other’s work and distinct artistic practice. Sharing organizational,
administrative loads while being artistically aligned and inspired by each other, is the
core axis of Work of Act as a production platform today. It has evolved into a dynamic structure
open to new collaborations, partner organizations, formats and approaches in contemporary
performance.