Frankfurt Moves!

Ali Al Samra (Lebanon)
Ali Al Samra is an Arab theatre maker, performer and researcher, born in a city combining a mixture of veiled pasts, death, contradictions, halal and haram. Having studied acting and directing at the Lebanese University, he developed a curiosity for discovering myths, fables and stories and merging multidisciplinary articulations for storytelling, such as shadow theatre, puppets and masks. As a performer, his latest works include The Tale of the Shadows (2022), Elephant in the Room (2023) and Pinocchio (2024). The integration of theatre in social-educational fields is one of his main research interests. Ali Al Samra joined The Red Bridge Ensemble in 2018, a group focused on Playback Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed. In 2021, he also joined The International Institution for Very Serious Studies (IIVVSS), a performance training programme for social engagement. Through his work with Seenaryo, he developed his expertise in play-based learning approaches through theatre in schools.

Jana Bou Matar (Lebanon)
Jana Bou Matar is a theatre maker who performs, directs and writes for theatre to challenge concepts around political and social ideas in her environment. She has written and directed her first theatre performance Meaning Making Cocktail, produced by Zoukak Theater, which was shown in Monnot Theater (2021) and Zoukak Theater (2022) and was invited to represent Lebanon in Carthage Festival. She has worked as assistant director on multiple plays, including The Rave Empire, The Gazelle of Akka, Lines directed by Junaid Sarieddine and Pinocchio, directed by Omar Abi Azar. Jana Bou Matar is currently pursuing her master's in Theatre Studies at Saint Joseph University of Beirut. She is one of the founders of Kawalis Zoukak Kommunity which is a community of performing arts practitioners focused on the growth of collective and individual artistic practices. Since 2021, Jana Bou Matar has been a performer and member of Laban Theater, a troupe that works with improvisational theatre and its applications in civil society.

Catalina Corredor (Colombia/Argentina)
Colombian artist based in Argentina. She develops interdisciplinary artistic work, combining object, audiovisual, scenic and movement poetics. She co-directs the object poetics platform Ciclo Objeto and is director of the performance project Anomalia and the LabPem – Laboratory of Performing Poetics of Material. She works in collaboration with different directors and choreographers, such as director Jesús Nieto (Cía. Onírica Mecánica) and the Communication and Culture Area of FLACSO (Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences). She is a specialist in Object Theatre and has a Master in Theatre and Performing Arts from the National University of the Arts, Buenos Aires, and is a graduate in Artistic Education from the District University of Bogotá.

Mariano Landa (Argentina)
Mariano Landa is an actor and wheelchair dancer for the dance company Sin Fronteras and a circus teacher for children with disabilities at the “Redes” Circus Club Association. His personal search is aimed at making known the possibilities of non-hegemonic bodies in the performing arts. With the dance company he has been at festivals in Spain, Russia and in different places in Argentina. He worked with choreographer Sharon Fridman in 2020 with the project Punto aka Punto. He was part of the production team of the 2nd and 3rd Latin American Inclusive Dance Festival and is currently developing an autobiographical work based on his illness ATAXIA in collaboration with different artists.

David Maurity (Brazil)
David Maurity is a black Brazilian actor, playwright and director. He is a co-founder of Toda Deseo company, an important group of artists from Minas Gerais, whose research is focused on new forms of theatrical occupation and contemporary creation based on questions related to identities, multiplicities and otherness. David Maurity’s works are manifestos for the right to existence of all bodies and their differences. They are true acts of resistance, inclusion and the fight against prejudice. He is also a member of the platform Ka’adela, where he works as a playwright and actor and with which he was invited to the biggest dance and performance festivals in Brazil. David Maurity is also a DJ and his work and research in this area is focused on Brazilian rhythms and sounds that populate the imagination of the LGBTQIAPN+ population throughout history. He has a master’s degree in Brazilian contemporary literature from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.

Idylla Silmarovi (Brazil)
Idylla Silmarovi works as a performing artist and researcher. She works with multiple languages of the arts of presence, such as: theatre, dance, performance and cabaret. She also writes texts for dance and theatre. She has a master's degree from the postgraduate programme in Performing Arts at the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, with research entitled Art strategies in a guerrilla state. It investigates the intersections between art and activism within the performing arts, especially regarding the debate around memory as a right denied by coloniality. In addition, her practice and research are directly related to racialised feminist and LGBTQIA+ struggles. She works with collectives in partnership with Toda Deseo, Academia TransLiterária, Plataforma de Criação Divinas and other artists and movements. Furthermore, she is artistic director and creator of the platform/residence Zona de Encontro, creator of the research and experimentation project E.C.O.S (Sudaka-oriented scenic experiments) and creator and general director of Plataforma Ka’adela. She is present at several national and international festivals with her artistic and intellectual production. She seeks to sink imaginary caravels and is interested in crowning transvestites.

VukuvukuPhila! (South Africa)
The artist duo VukuvukuPhila! (ivukuvuku and Philiswa Lila) have been creating installation art and performances since 2022. ivukuvuku, born Chumani Bavulele Mantanga, is from Mgwenyane village at Tsomo in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. As a multidimensional artist, ivukuvuku completed her bachelor’s degree in Fine and Applied Arts at the Tshwane University of Technology. Philiswa Lila is a visual artist and researcher. She holds a master’s in Art History from Rhodes University, an Honours in Curatorship from the University of Cape Town, a Project Management Certificate from the University of South Africa (Unisa) and a bachelor’s degree in Fine and Applied Arts from Tshwane University of Technology. VukuvukuPhila!’s work engages a research-based practice that involves themes of memory, healing, gender, violence, love, pain, ancestry and resilience. By combining writing, language biography, sound, installation art and performance, they aim to engage audiences in an emotive experience laced with an outpouring of mind, body and spirit escapes from everyday life. Materiality plays a vital role in their process, it extends beyond the simple fact of physical matter to broadly encompass all relevant information related to spiritual existence. They explore the active processes of reconnecting and recreating relationships within the sacred space where the presence of nature and ancestors reside. As a result, their process takes into consideration the importance of site-specific elements like water, stone, sun, wind and fire. Their focus is on engaging these elements as a multi-layered connecting system. They embody the values and meanings of space, position, orientation and the soulfulness of life to forge the interrelations between human beings, animals, spirituality and communities. VukuvukuPhila!’s previous art installations and performances include A Bed Called Home: Shared Pain and Healing, Reflections of Reflected Self, ENKUNDLENI/Pouring Healing and EKHAYA: Kept Silence. 

Daniel Arnan Quarshie employs his memories and experiences through drawing as a point of departure in engaging social themes and general questions in art. His work deals with loss by giving form and presence to absence through memory. Quarshie’s drawings, built in fragments or layers or both, are reinterpretations of time, space and experience- holding together the past, present and future.

Born and raised in Ghana, Quarshie holds a BFA in Painting and Sculpture from KNUST, Kumasi, and is currently pursuing his MFA in the same department. In 2022, Quarshie participated in documenta fifteen and Gasthof22 as one of the representatives of blaxTARLINES, Kumasi. Later that year, he participated in Unlimited, Gallery 1957, Accra, after which he was awarded a residency with the gallery. In April 2023, Quarshie opened his first solo exhibition, “Sympathetic Magic”, in Gallery 1957, Accra. He has since had his second solo exhibition, “Home”, with Compound House Gallery in Kumasi, and is also a participant of “Unlimited II”, Gallery1957, Accra.

Sopo Kashakashvili is a Georgian interdisciplinary artist, cultural mediator and educator. In her work, she explores the themes of individual vs. collective histories, migration, belonging and the interrelation between body and architecture. Her research focuses on social coexistence, response to the immediate environment and the deconstruction of language. Kashakashvili's work is based on spatial installations which she describes as 'social constellations' in which videos, sound, performance, texts and drawings overlap to create immersive experiences. Her inspiration often comes from theatre, dance choreographies and text-based research. The inclusion of materials from urban life, textiles and various everyday objects can often be seen in her work. Another important layer in her practice is collaborative and collective works, public interventions and mobile structures.
 
She is a founding member of the artist and architect collective commune6x3. Her most recent works were part of the Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm in collaboration with textxtnd (2023). At Theater Der Welt, she showed her work ‘Opened Flags’ (2023) with her collaborator Larry Bonchaka. In 2023, she won 2nd place in the PlayGround Art Prize. Kashakashvili has exhibited at the Opelvillen, Kunstverein Wiesbaden and Blech Kunst e.v., Halle, Saale, among others. 

Jiyoon Hyun (South Korea) 

The South Korean pianist Jiyoon Hyun, born in Seoul in 1990, began her musical journey at the age of five with a toy piano gifted by her grandfather. Her passion for the piano has remained a central part of her life ever since. She graduated from the Seoul Arts High School and went on to earn her bachelor's degree from Seoul National University. In 2019, she began studying for her Master’s degree at the University of the Arts in Bremen with Martin von der Heydt. During this period, she was awarded two scholarships: one from the German Orchestra Foundation and another from the German Music Council (Deutscher Musikrat), involving a concert at the Clavier-Salon in Göttingen. Additionally, she received positive feedback in the master class of Katarzyna Popowa-Zydroń, a jury member for the International Chopin Piano Competition. Thanks to her fellow composer Kyungjin Lim, she discovered the joy of contemporary music and is still fascinated by it today, which has led to various collaborations with contemporary composers. She joined the contemporary music organization, the ensemble SONOR XXI, in 2018, and is currently its artistic director. In 2023, she was equally active in South Korea as a pianist and initiator of numerous performances. Highlights include "Voice of Women", a project to publicise works by uncelebrated female composers, as well as the reading-cum-concert "Between Book and Music", a project that connects music and books.

Yuheng Chen (China)

Yuheng Chen began piano lessons at the age of five in China and, starting in 2017, studied composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw). Chen's teachers included Clara Iannotta and Michael Jarrell (composition) as well as Karlheinz Essl (electroacoustic composition). Chen also attended seminars and private classes with Mochizuki Misato, Olga Neuwirth, Ying Wang, Chaya Czernowin, Francesco Filidei and Franck Bedrossian, among others. Yuheng Chen's work explores the possibilities of instrumental sound material and the fragile balance between noise and pitch. As a composer and performer, Chen focuses on investigating and pushing the boundaries of instrumental sound modulation. The fractured, broken, fleeting and intense emotions that arise from the complexity of contemporary life are transformed into powerful and unique sonic landscapes. In 2022, Chen was a finalist in the Ö1 Talentebörse competition in Austria. In 2023, Chen was a laureate of the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award and received first prizes at the Concorso Internazionale di Composizione, the Frank Robert Abell Young Composers Competition in the USA and the Irino Composition Prize in Japan. Chen's compositions have been presented at festivals and international concert venues, including the Witten Days of New Chamber Music, Tokyo Operacity Composium 2023, Impuls Festival Graz, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, Klangspuren Schwaz, Festival Mixtur Barcelona and Wien Modern. Chen's works have been performed by various orchestras and ensembles, such as the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, Ensemble Recherche, Ensemble Names, Ensemble Phace, Ensemble Platypus and many others.

Since it was founded in 2009, Frankfurt LAB has established itself as a vital performance and producing space for contemporary performing arts and music in the Rhine-Main region. The aim of its five partner institutions Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company, Ensemble Modern, Hessian Theatre Academy, Frankfurt University for Music and Performing Arts (HfMDK) and Künstlerhaus Mousonturm is to connect the work of internationally renowned ensembles with supporting emerging artists and to encourage a productive exchange between dance, choreography, performance, theatre and music. Frankfurt LAB offers the ideal conditions for this: with facilities of a high technical standard and in a protected setting, artists can rehearse and show their work completely flexibly in a 650 m² stage area and on a 300 m² studio stage.

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