Horla

Lightning strikes. In the gap between the flash and the thunder, a thought has only seconds.

The production reached the repertoire through the 2026/2027 open call and is made as a co-production of Tartu New Theatre, Forecast Company and the Estonian Youth Theatre.

The name “Horla” comes from the French wordplay hors (“out”, “outside”) and là (“there”), carrying the sense of what is left out, pushed aside, standing outside. It is someone alone in the middle of a storm, on both a physical and a psychological scale at once: someone facing something immeasurably greater than themselves, over which they have no control.

“Horla” is a visual sequence of images in which the human and the storm meet, the sublime and the squalid, hope and despair, the attempt to understand and the surrender to the inevitable. At the centre of the production is the human relationship with a force that cannot be fully described or rationalised. A person trying to describe a storm always remains, next to their words, absurdly small.

The storm approaches, the storm destroys, the storm does not choose or distinguish. Its predictability and at the same time its complete unpredictability, its justice or injustice, remain incomprehensible to people. The storm does not hate, despise or love; it simply is. Before such a force, the last possibility for a person may be to come to terms with their own smallness.

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The production searches for a visual language for what words fail to express: how to depict something that flows over a person and beyond their ability to grasp it? A person tries to make sense of a catastrophe, to measure and order it: to give the storm a name, calculate its strength, count the victims, draw up lists and look for causes. “Horla” sets alongside this rational effort the storm itself: its sublimity, its terror and its indifference. In this field of tension the last desperate flash of hope and total surrender meet. The production looks at a person at the moment when ordinary explanations no longer apply, and only their presence in front of something indescribably great remains.

On stage

Johanna Vaiksoo

Artist and director

Joel Väli

Dramaturge

Andreas Kübar

Costume designer

Lisette Sivard

Lighting artist

Leon Allik

Sound artist

Lauri Lest

Voice designer

Anne Türnpu

Co-production

Forecast Company

Estonian Youth Theatre

Tartu New Theatre

Supporters

City of Tartu

Cultural Endowment of Estonia

Premiere

16 January 2027

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