Work of Act (GbR) is a production platform for contemporary choreographic projects by Fabrice Mazliah and May Zarhy in Frankfurt am 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.

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.

History

Work of Act is the new platform and home for the collaboration between May and Fabrice. The connection between Fabrice Mazliah and May Zarhy started in 2009 within the collective MAMAZA that was originally founded by Fabrice Mazliah, Ioannis Mandafounis and May Zarhy. The three choreographers met within The Forsythe Company in 2005 and thereafter, decided to start working together. In 2011-2012 MAMAZA were associated artist in deSingel theater in Antwerp Belgium. In 2012-2014 they were resident artists at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt (Doppelpass Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation). Since 2015, 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 organisational model, which allows the reinforcement of each other’s work and own distinct artistic practice. Sharing organisational, administrative loads while being artistically aligned and inspired by each other, is the core axis of Work of Act as a production platform. It has evolved into a dynamic structure open to new collaborations, partner organisations, formats and approaches in contemporary performance.