We sat down for an exclusive interview with Stefan, multi-disciplinary artist and certified trauma therapist. His show When the Clarion Comes to Call is about the cycling of trauma, healing and repair. Told through dance, physical theatre, spoken word, storytelling and song, the show draws on their personal experiences of displacement from former Yugoslavia. Stefan embodies the clarion, covered completely in a striking ivory, statue-like aesthetic.
This show runs from 31st Oct to 1st Nov at The Cockpit Theatre – Tickets here
The Clarion is such a beautiful and mystical symbol of queer resilience. What first drew you to it, and how did it become the centre of this piece?
The clarion is a little bird in the wren family whose call warns the rest of the animal kinland that danger is near. Its voice travels ahead of the threat — a signal to pay attention, to stay close, to survive. I’ve always imagined that other species understand the meaning of this call or at least feel its urgency. In many ways, I think a lot of us are calling out like this now — across social media, across oceans, across time zones and bloodlines — trying to warn one another that something is coming, or perhaps more truthfully, that something is already here. So, I began to imagine the clarion as more than a bird — as a mythic, winged being, both creature and kin, carrying messages for those willing to listen and for those who’ve forgotten how. A queer herald. A fractured prophet. A mirror. The character at the heart of the piece is my interpretation of this clarion: not quite human, not quite animal, but fully alive. They arrive to sing, to speak, to crack open the surface of things — calling us not just to alert, but to tenderness. Not to turn away. Not to harden. But to find our humanity and let it ring.
You’re not only an artist but also a certified trauma therapist. How do those two practices feed each other in When the Clarion Came to Call?
Both personally and professionally, I’ve spent the past decade listening to stories of trauma — stories held in bodies, families, communities, landscapes. As our collective awareness of trauma deepens, so too does the recognition that much of what we carry is shared: culturally, systemically, somatically. The narrative of When the Clarion Came to Call emerges from that listening. It’s a distillation of recurring themes I’ve encountered across years of therapeutic and embodied work — moments of rupture, reckoning, resistance, and repair. When trauma arrives at our doorstep, we may look away. We may deny it, rage against it, collapse under it, or try to outrun it. Sometimes we freeze. Sometimes we fracture. There’s no single way we respond when our world feels like its breaking open — and this piece is really about that: the arrival of the uninvited, and what we do with it. The clarion is both witness and messenger. A part of me, and yet not me. Through it, I over a series of reflections, provocations, and invitations — a call to stay with what feels unbearable. In many ways, When the Clarion Came to Call is my attempt to share my work as a healer outside of the therapeutic space — to bring it into an artistic container, where those who may never encounter therapy can still experience the possibility of being moved, seen, and met.
What have you discovered about your own healing through embodying this “winged healer” on stage?
What am I trying to do — and what do I hope my audiences might receive? The clarion continually asks me to align with what matters. Not just on stage, but in my day-to-day life: Am I living in integrity with what I say I care about? Is there coherence between my actions and my longing? Each time I rehearse or perform, I find myself practicing atonement — to the room, to the people in it, to the field we’re creating together. That kind of relational presence is, for me, the heart of healing. It’s not about fixing or solving — it’s about resonance, and the possibility of connection. For many years, I identified with the archetype of the outcast — the queer healer at the edge of things, what performance artist Ardot Aslan calls “a dry cleaner of the soul.” Someone working quietly in the margins to metabolise what others can’t hold. But through the clarion, I’ve come to recognise that I have a role to play in community. That performance is not just spectacle — it’s service. If I can show up with coherence — if my intention is clean, grounded, and embodied — then I believe others will attune in return. That’s the exchange. That’s the ritual. And that’s the healing.
You often describe your works as rituals. What role do you see ritual playing for both you and the audience in this piece?
In her science fiction novel, Parable of the Sower (1993), Octavia Butler wrote that “all that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.” For me, that’s one of the most honest definitions of ritual: an act that takes place in one physical dimension — a room, a theatre, a body — and yet has the power to create change in another. I recently heard artist Keith Hennessy describe spellcasting in similar terms — a way of bending reality through presence and intention. That’s how I think of my work, and When the Clarion Came to Call in particular: as a spellcasting ritual. One where the audience and I have made a quiet agreement to come to/gather — in a specific space, at a specific time — to witness something that may or may not leave a mark. My hope is that at least some part of each person leaves changed — even in a small way. Perhaps with a question that wasn’t there before. A feeling that rises to the surface. A new story they carry home in their body. Or simply a visible emotion on their face that the world might notice. For me, ritual in performance isn’t about entertainment or escape. It’s about an exchange — not just financial, but energetic, emotional, symbolic. In this work, I tell a story. A reflection. A provocation. And each audience member gets to choose: to integrate it, to reject it, to carry it forward, or to let it go. And in return, I receive something too. Their presence. Their attention. Their silence, their breath, their discomfort, their laughter. That’s the nature of ritual — it’s never one-way. It’s a loop. A pulse. A field we make together, even if we never speak.
When people leave the performance, what do you hope they carry with them?
I hope they leave carrying the belief that when we gather in artistic spaces, we conjure the power to imagine. In one of her poems, Diane di Prima wrote: “The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All other wars are subsumed by it.” That line stays with me. We’re living through a time where even the most destructive forces — those who silence, displace, and dehumanise — are also using imagination. And that’s terrifying. So where do we come to imagine? And by we, I mean those of us who believe in human rights, in justice, in the transformative power of art. I believe the theatre is still one of the rare spaces where we can gather in real time, not to escape, but to rehearse new realities. When the audience walks away from When the Clarion Came to Call, I hope they carry the ember of that possibility — that we can imagine better futures together and begin to live them now. Because if we lose our capacity to imagine, then what the clarion has come to warn us about will indeed come to pass.