Horla

Lightning strikes. The mind counts the seconds between the flash and the rumble. The production joined the repertoire through the 2026/2027 open call and is a co-production by Tartu Uus Teater, Forecast Company and Eesti Noorsooteater.

The name “Horla” comes from a French wordplay on hors (“outside,” “beyond”) and là (“there”), and carries the sense of someone excluded, cast aside, or outside. It is someone alone in the middle of a storm—at once in a physical and psychological sense. Someone facing something immeasurably greater than themselves, over which they have no control.

“Horla” is a sequence of visual images in which human and storm, the sublime and the vulgar, hope and despair, the attempt to understand and surrender to the inevitable meet. At the heart of the production is the human relationship with a force that cannot be fully described or rationalised. For a person trying to describe a storm is always left ridiculously small beside their words.

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. Faced with such a force, a person’s last possibility may be to accept their own smallness.

The production searches for a visual language for what words resist: how do you depict something that overwhelms a person and their ability to understand it? People try to make sense of catastrophe, measure it and put it in order—to give the storm a name, calculate its strength, count its victims, draw up lists and find reasons. “Horla” sets this rational endeavour against the storm itself: its sublimity, terror and inviolability. In this tension, the last desperate flash of hope meets complete surrender. The production observes a person at the moment when familiar explanations no longer apply and all that remains is their presence before something indescribably vast.

Performing: Johanna Vaiksoo
Director and designer: Joel Väli
Dramaturg: Andreas Kübar
Costume designer: Lisette Sivard
Lighting designer: Leon Allik
Sound designer: Lauri Lest
Voice designer: Anne Türnpu

Co-production: Forecast Company, Eesti Noorsooteater, Tartu Uus Teater
Supported by: Tartu linn, Eesti Kultuurkapital
Premiere: 16 January 2027

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