Claire Huber - Fondations (working title)

Further pursuing her research on rhythms and their expressivities, Fondations builds on Balkan asymmetrical rhythms that combine the metric bases of western traditions which « counts time » and non-metric modulations of eastern traditions.

From those composite musical bases, we investigate the question of makeshift foundations. What holds ? What implodes ? Seizing the problem choreographically, we acknowledge that we had to « go through the Balkans » in order to raise the question of compound foundations.

Profiling a long migration-landscape of bodies, poetical texts and sounds, the piece reconfigurates the time of the epic, understood here as a regime of encountering the other. An epic time that casts off milestones and monuments for an unceasing journey with makeshift halts and foundations, an epic poetry that has renounced glorification and narration, to bring forth our anonymous wander in quest of a ground that always escapes.

During this residency, Stalin Abdi, Nastasja Stefanic and Claire Huber will work with the figure of the rhapsodist (strailog in kurdish) as a starting point for questioning the affects in the voice (impulses and projections) and in the movements. How are those affects generated (and not composed with) by the space (sources of the sounds, recipients…), by the actions or movements, by the semantic weight of the words, by the relation to the floor...

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).