Concept, text and direction: Claire Huber
Creation and performance: Stalin Blake, Claire Huber, Nastasja Stefanič
Costumes: Zdravka Ivandija Kirigin
Scenography: Stalin Blake and Claire Huber
Technique: Emmanuel Desmyter
Production: Inflexions
Coproductions and partners: The Croatian Institute for Movement and Dance (The Institute – Hrvatski
institut za pokret i ples) (HR), CDCN Toulouse-La place de la danse (FR), Honolulu-Nantes (FR), La
ménagerie de verre (FR), Le Marni (BE), BUDA (BE), KAAP (BE), STUK (BE), De school van Gaasbeek
(BE), Balkan Dance Academy Slovenia (SI), Garage Performing art center (GR), DEVIR/CAPA (PT),
STATION for contemporary dance (SR), ZPC (HR), Mediterranean Dance Center (HR).
With the support of the Flemish community, of F.W.B., of W.B.I., of I-Portunus (Creative Europe), of
Teatroskop-Institut français and the ministry of culture of the Croatian Republic.
Premiere 11th of June 2021 in Festival Dance Week in Zagreb, Croatia
Duration 45 minutes

The show is presented for the first time in Romania, as part of Tranzit Days 2023, thanks to Teatroskop (a regional programme for the performing arts initiated by the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, the French Ministry of Culture and the French Institute in Paris) and thanks to our constant partners the French Institute in Cluj.

« As we drove short short horizon-lines» is a sonic and choreographic piece, and a collaboration of poet and choreographer Claire Huber, with Croatian dancer and musician Nastasja Štefanić, and Kurdish musician and singer Stalin Blake. Claire Huber’s performative work invests the crossroad between oral poetry, movement, live sound and music. She conceives her pieces as « choreographies for the listening », as they sculpt the perceptions of the audience in time and invites them to what is not immediately given. In As we drove short short horizon-lines, she follows the sensitive inflections of the long journeys on the broken geographic lines that go from the Middle Eastern regions, across the Balkans, to Western Europe, and back. The performance profiles an abstract trajectory with cultural residues, in which, like in the so called « asymmetrical rhythms » of the region, long-lasting and short-lasting times are juxtaposed. Movements, sounds, words are performed in search for a continuity in uneluctably heterogeneous rhythms and in uneluctably heterogeneous territories. An ode to traveling bodies to whom the grounds never grips.

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, linguistic and somatic but also unfold a fragile poetic “sense” that is non-discursive and non-representative.

Nastasja Štefanić is a professional musician, dancer, choreographer and a music and dance pedagogue who lives and works in Zagreb. She holds a BA and an MA degree in viola which she received from the Music Academy in Zagreb. She is one of the first generation of contemporary dance students at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb (ADA) where in July 2016 she completed her undergraduate studies and got a BA degree at the Dance department, the performance strand, thus gaining a degree of a contemporary dancer. Nastasja makes her own pieces and also collaborates regularly with both Croatian and foreign artists, as a musician and a dancer, she has performed all around Croatia and abroad. Currently she works as a teaching assistant at the Drama and Dance departments at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb and from January 2018 has the official freelance artist status.

Stalin Blake is a musician of Kurdish origin, guitarist and singer, born in the North of Syria, where he learned music “by ear”, and through oral transmission, from a very early age. Then, after arriving in Damas, he studied classical guitar at the Russian Academy of Damas, as well as flamenco at the Spanish Embassy. In the first group he gathered, Azadi, he composed pieces of music – without score – that fuse musical modes, from traditional Kurdish melodies to gipsy music, flamenco and blues. At that time, he is already interested in the effect sound has on moving bodies, the walk in particular. Stateless in Syria because of his Kurdish origin, he set off for the long journey that brought him to Belgium almost ten years ago. There he plays everywhere, down in the streets just as much as up in famous concert halls such as Beursschouwburg, Ancienne Belgique, KVS, VK, Muziekpublique. He also creates music for theater pieces (Bronks, Centre Bruegel, théâtre Océan nord). With his group “Stalin Black”, he collaborates with the Art Center “Globe Aroma” that gathers artists coming from the immigration.

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