Stefan Jovanović Kaasa on Trauma and Healing in When the Clarion Came to Call

In this solo performance by artist and somatic traumatologist Stefan Jovanović Kaasa, myth meets movement in a ritual that resists categorisation and demands to be felt before understood. The clarion, a winged healer, emerges from the shadows bearing messages of warning and transformation. Combining dance, physical theatre, spoken word, storytelling and song, When the Clarion Came to Call unfolds in the round across nine archetypal chapters. It channels the cyclical nature of trauma and healing, tracing the fractured lines between accountability and the possibility of renewal. At its centre is the clarion—a mystical bird-being and symbol of queer resilience—inviting audiences into a shared space of reckoning, intimacy and the phantasmagorical.

What inspired you to create When the Clarion Came to Call?

I began writing When the Clarion Came to Call two years ago, in the wake of growing polarisation I was witnessing — between friends, families, political communities. I noticed how quickly collective identities could form around the naming of an “other.” How we bond through blame. Beneath this, I sensed a deeper grief that hadn’t been fully processed since the pandemic — a grief that quietly laid the groundwork for the fractures we now live inside. I wanted to write a story from the perspective of something older and wiser — a little bird, a clarion, who flies between all humans without distinction. Its call doesn’t discriminate. It brings the same message to everyone. It speaks to a shared fate that concerns all sentient life: that trauma is a fact of living — but what we do with trauma is the real question. What do we do when we witness it around us? When it happens to us? When we feel powerless in the face of collective suffering?

When the Clarion Came to Call became a story about that reckoning — an invitation to pause, to reflect, to gather, and to feel.

Why did you choose the clarion bird as the symbol for this piece?

The clarion is a real bird — a member of the wren family — but it also holds mythic weight. It’s known for its warning call, a sound that alerts nearby species to approaching danger. What moved me was the idea that this call — clear, sharp, impossible to ignore — speaks not just to one kind, but to many.

In that way, it became a symbol of care. A kind of queer prophet. It doesn’t plead; it doesn’t panic — it just calls. Over and over again.

How do the nine urns relate to your personal story?

There are nine urns in the piece — one for each month of gestation. They mark a cycle between life and death, birth and becoming. On one level, the urns are universal — they hold stories, voices, fragments of lives wanting to come into being. But they’re also deeply personal.

I was a silent baby. Born without a cry — which, at the time, was seen as a sign of a "good child." But pre- and peri-natal somatic work has taught us to ask what lies beneath silence. In my case, it was an early initiation into dissociation. And a lifelong question: how do we find our voice? As children. As adolescents. As adults.

Each urn holds a voice — some are my own, others are distilled from the many stories I’ve witnessed in my healing work. Together they form a kind of chorus. I give each urn space to speak, in honour of every voice that was never heard. As I believe: when we name something, we give voice to those who couldn't speak.

What was it like working with clay and ceramics for the first time?

Challenging. Thrilling. Intense. Obsessive. Ecstatic. Intimate.

Working with clay felt uncannily like working with bodies — which is familiar territory for me, as a trauma therapist. So much of my therapeutic work involves touch and attuning to the nervous system — listening for what needs holding, what’s been missed, what’s asking to emerge.

When I began turning clay, I realised I was waiting for something — that subtle pulse, the protoplasmic shimmer of earth and water coming alive together. As I shaped the urns, they began to shape me. Some were stubborn, others playful or tender. Each one had its own mood, its own timing. Each one became a character, mimicking the process it asked of me.

As Ann Weiser Cornell writes, “Listening is like touching an already turning wheel, in the same direction that it’s moving.” That’s exactly how it felt. When I work with clay, I’m not just shaping earth — I’m entering into relationship with something alive, in motion. And in turn, it touches me back.

How does your background as a trauma therapist influence the performance?

I trained as a trauma therapist after years of witnessing the emotional collateral behind the scenes of performance-making. I wanted to understand what impact live work has on our nervous systems — how art, when made and held with care, can become ritual.

When the Clarion Came to Call is rooted in attunement. I may have a script and a score, but every night is different. The constellation of people in the room changes the work. There’s a living field that emerges — and my job is to listen to it.

Sometimes there’s someone in the audience who really needs to hear a part of the story. And someone else for whom it might be too much. My job is not to control that, but to sense it — to hold the space with enough spaciousness for both experiences to co-exist.

Performance, for me, is a form of collective nervous system regulation. It’s not just about being seen — it’s about seeing back. It’s about presence, relationship, and remembering that transformation doesn’t have to be loud. It can happen in silence too.

In what ways do your experiences of displacement shape the work?

My family left the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s — I’m a first-generation immigrant, but also the fourth generation in my family to be displaced by political upheaval. Different reasons, different borders, different wars — but you start to see a pattern. A rhythm of rupture.

When trauma lives in the field, some run toward it out of duty or love, while others run from it to survive. But displacement doesn’t dissolve ancestral memory. Whether you leave or stay, the stories follow you. We carry them — in our nervous systems, our silences, our choices, our dreams.

When the Clarion Came to Call is shaped by that inheritance. Without giving too much away, the clarion’s story is deeply informed by the voices of the ancestors — the systems we didn’t choose to be born into, but which colour the path ahead. It’s a story about listening. Not just to what’s said, but to what still echoes in the spaces we’ve left behind.

Why did you decide to embody the “winged healer” on stage?

I’ve been treading the fine line between performance, ritual, and healing for a long time. At its best, live performance can touch people in ways that resemble the therapeutic — but I’ve learned through trial and error that theatre and therapy require different kinds of consent.

So, over the years, I’ve worked to refine a practice where the work can hold therapeutic effect, without imposing therapeutic expectation. When the Clarion Came to Call is the clearest articulation of that yet — a piece that invites transformation but doesn’t demand it. It offers a spell, a reckoning, a provocation. The rest is up to the audience.

The clarion — this winged creature — felt like the only one who could carry that weight. And in the end, I realised I had to embody them myself. Because if I believe in healing beyond the clinical space, if I believe in art as medicine, then I have to stand behind that belief. I have to live it. On stage.

What does the breaking and chipping of the urns during performances mean to you?

I began working with clay specifically for this project, shaping the pieces I called urns — vessels for the ashes of stories, made from earth, water, and fire. Each urn holds emotional sediment: things unspoken, unfinished, unmourned.

The ceramic process mirrors what we go through as human beings — the softness of clay, the drying out, the intensity of heat that locks something into form. Like trauma, it hardens what was once fluid. It makes meaning rigid. The urns represent those fixed narratives — heavy, beautiful, imposing — and yet, always fragile.

With every performance, they chip a little more. Their erosion becomes part of the work. It reminds us that even the most seemingly solid stories can crack. Even the demons we think are permanent might just need to be touched — not with violence, but with presence.

The urns are both set and collaborators. Costume and character. They resist and respond. They speak through sound — ceramic against ceramic, ceramic against skin — a friction that evokes both tenderness and rupture. They’re a metaphor for the way trauma lives in the body: heavy, echoing, but never beyond the possibility of change.

What do you hope audiences feel or understand after seeing the show?

I don’t promise a happy ending — this isn’t a Disney story. It’s not safe, but I hope it’s brave. As Micky ScottBey Jones says, “Together we will create brave space — because there is no such thing as safe space.”

We live in a time of repetition — trauma cycles looping through generations. We claim to be evolving as a society, but some days it feels like we’re sliding backwards. So the real question becomes: what will we do differently? What will our generation choose to interrupt, to transform?

If the audience leaves asking that question — even just to themselves — then the clarion’s work is done.

What are your hopes for your company, Strange Fictions?

It’s taken two years to bring When the Clarion Came to Call into the world. The immediate next step is to tour it widely — both in the UK and internationally. While the company’s identity right now is closely tied to the clarion and its mythic world, my long-term vision is to return to ensemble work and to collaborate with other dance-theatre companies who are open to a little strange and a little fictitious mischief.

Every piece I make is a project in intention and world-building. They take years to make, and they’re meant to linger. I hope this one reaches enough hearts and minds to galvanise support for what comes next.

Ultimately, I want Strange Fictions to grow into an international community — not just an audience, but a network of kindred spirits connected through story, imagination, and the shared belief that the future isn’t something we wait for — it’s something we rehearse together.

When the Clarion Came to Call plays at The Cockpit Theatre from 31 October - 1 November. Tickets are available at: https://www.thecockpit.org.uk/