Claire Huber - As we drove short short horizon-lines
Claire Huber and her team return to STUK for a final technical residency before the upcoming première of their new creation in Zagreb.
As we drove short short horizon-lines is a sonic and choreographic performance, and a collaboration between poet and director Claire Huber, dancer and musician Nastasja Štefanić, and musician and vocalist Stalin Blake. The starting point for the piece are the asymmetrical rhythms found in the Balkans till the Middle East. Fascinating rhythms since they articulate diversity instead of blending it. They go ‘12 12 123’, or ‘short short short long’, or ‘titititi taaaaaaaaa’, alternating two different time signatures, or rather, bridging two different logics: the time that is counted and the time that is modulated.
On a long trajectory that departs in Kurdish lands through the Balkans to Brussels, and back and again, we drive melodic lines. Melodic lines that materialize through words, movements and sounds. Profiling an abstract pathway with cultural residues, the piece invites to give ear to the inflections of sensitive journeys through heterogeneous territories.
Claire Huber is a poet, a choreographer, a performer and a dramaturgist.
Her work invests the crossroad between oral poetry, dance and movement, music and sound. She conceives her pieces as « choreographies for the listening » as they sculpt the perceptions of the audience in time, to bring them to a listening and to plunge them into what is not immediately given.
Over the last years she has been leading a series of experiments around rhythm. Both terribly vital and rigorously mathematical, they draw the outlines of her latest pieces.
Concept, direction and text : Claire Huber
Creation and performance : Stalin Blake, Claire Huber, Nastasja Štefanić
Costumes : Zdravka Ivandija Kirigin
Technique : Emmanuel Desmyter
Scenography : Stalin Blake and Claire Huber
Support for administration and production : France Morin
Production : Inflexions (FR)
Coproductions : Le Senghor (BE)
Partners : STUK (BE), BUDA (BE), KAAP (BE), De School van Gaasbeek (BE), Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia (SI), Garage Performing art center (GR), DEVIR/CAPA (PT), Arts Printing house (LT), Station (SR), Le Marni (BE), Le Senghor (BE), ZPC (HR), Mediterranean Dance Center (HR), CDCN Toulouse-Laplace de la danse (FR), Honolulu-Nantes (FR), La Ménagerie de Verre (FR)
With the support of the Flemish authorities, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles-Service de la danse, Wallonie-Bruxelles International, I-Portunus (Creative Europe), Teatroskop-Institut Français and the ministry of culture of the Croatian Republic
Claire Huber’s work invests the crossroad between oral poetry, dance and music.
Educated to Humanities in Paris, and holding a master degree in philosophy at the E.H.E.S.S., she firstly devoted herself to writing and translating poetry (a.o. Rainer Maria Rilke) and to direction and text adaptation for theater (The Idiot by Dostoievsky). Then, she was committed to theater companies (linked to the Grotowsky Institute) and story-telling in Western Africa, where was revealed her taste for orality and the presence of the body that says. As she came back to Europe, she turned to the study and practice of dance, pursuing an education in the Tanzfabrik, Berlin, and then in the research studios in P.A.R.T.S., in Brussels.
For a few years, she leads experimentations and research around the expressiveness of rhythms and phrasing : accents, inflections, punctuation, modulation, syncopation, etc. are understood as compositional knots that enable to raise and give shape to questions that are not only musical, literary and somatic but also unfold a fragile poetic “sense” that is non-discursive and non-representative.
Her lastest pieces comprise No.oN, that elaborates on « the body that says no » in dialogue with her poem No.oN and Iannis Xenakis’ Rebonds A, as well as Foundations, that traces the asymmetrical rhythms that combine middle-eastern non-metric modulations with the metric articulations of the western traditions in order to give rise to composite foundations, in collaboration with musician Stalin Abdi and performer Nastasja Stefanic. They are supported by STUK, KAAP, BUDA, and several performance centers across Europe (La place de la danse/CDCN-Toulouse, Kino Siska/Slovenia, ZPC/Croatia, Arts Printing House/Lithuania, DEVIR/CAPA/Portugal, Stanica/Serbia among others).