The Maids – Materials

Locked away in a refugee shelter, women, who have arrived from different corners of the world, enact endless games and intimate micro-performances to reveal their hidden identities. They give expression to themselves in a language that’s taking shape in front of those present, a language they’ll never fully master. Teetering between audition and job interview, the tone of the encounter is gradually changing. The question of identity is taking the back seat but dignity is standing its ground, a dignity they can have NOW, not posthumously.

In part inspired by Jean Genet’s The Maids, this piece incorporates excerpts from Jean-Pierre Siméon’s Stabat Mater Furiosa, Dimitris Dimitriadis’ I’m Dying as a Country and from the Constitution of the French Republic.

WACHOWICZ/FRET Studio is a creative tandem whose first completed work, Sheol/ ששששששש, was created in December 2021. The artists focus on the interpenetration of theatre and performance art and on the complementarity of the two in each act on stage. Marked by hybridity and openness, the Studio’s works can be described with words such as performative installation, séance and action. Their common denominator is sonority and exceptional focus on sound and vibrations associated with even the smallest of actions. Wachowicz and Fret regularly collaborate with artists for whom musical sensitivity is paramount in defining the interpersonal and the quintessentially human. The Studio often uses tools derived from the tragic tradition rather than the dramatic one, aiming at what the artists describe as intravenous Hearing of the World!