TOIVOLA Festival 2025 invites you to join a special programme hosted by dancer-choreographer Kevin Fay (US/BE) and sound artist Guillaume Soula (FR) on Friday, 14 November, including a performance and a workshop.
Work in progress: blood and thunder
Kevin and Guillaume interrogate the idea of ’talking heads’ – defined as both a closeup picture of a person who is talking and a person whose talk is empty and pretentious. In a dialogue that includes movement, text, sound, and deconstructed American pop songs, the duo focuses on political discourse of gender identity and expression.
Workshop: conversing with masculinity
As part of his research project on masculinity, feminism, language, and the body, Kevin hosts a performative reading circle, where he facilitates collective reading, writing, listening, and moving to open and explore the interstices between words that refer to gender identity and expression.
Schedule
17:45 Doors open
18:00 Programme starts: performance, short break, workshop
21:00 Programme ends
Location: Bulevardi 3, 00120 Helsinki (on the corner of Bulevardi and Yrjönkatu).
There will be a short break between the performance and the workshop.
Language: English.
Places are very limited. Please register by 9 November, 2025. As spots are limited, the registration is binding. If you can not attend, please email tuotanto@toivolafestivaali.fi.
Accessibility: The venue is unfortunately not accessible due to two stairs at the entrance. There is no accessible toilet. Please contact the team at tuotanto@toivolafestaali.fi so they can look into potential ways to accommodate your individual needs.
In collaboration with the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux, Institut finlandais, and Hobo Hotel.
blood and thunder
For ‘blood and thunder’, dancer-choreographer Kevin Fay and sound artist Guillaume Soula will interrogate the idea of ’talking heads’ – defined as both a closeup picture of a person who is talking (e.g. TV news, talk shows, Instagram reels) and a person whose talk is empty and pretentious. In a dialogue that includes movement, text, sound, and deconstructed American pop songs (e.g. Talking Heads’ hits like ’Burning Down the House’, ’Life During Wartime’, ’Psycho Killer’, and ’Once in a Lifetime’), Kevin and Guillaume will address the notion of ‘blood and thunder’ by focusing on political discourse of gender identity and expression.
With tools developed in workshops, language will slide between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy and in so doing propose an open, shared space of listening and reflection. Simultaneously, because improvisation scores rely on text and movement, choreography for ’blood and thunder’ will play with distance or dissonance in terms of how bodies relate to words : anchored, stationary explorations of gravity will tumble up and down as they move through space. Importantly, scores include the voice, and the orientations of the body along improvised trajectories influence how the voice is perceived inside and outside.
As a preview to the upcoming series, ’blood and thunder’ explores exaggeration, hyperbole and uproar as realities of our time as well as tools for grappling with intensity. Rather, if ’talking heads’ providing world news, life advice, or religious admonition are unrestrained and exaggerated (e.g. facially, verbally), what kind of thunderous uproar emerges in the rest of the body? Is the power of the ’talking head’ felt throughout the person speaking, or is it an act of ventriloquy – dissociating the body from the words being heard? If so, what is the function of (dis)connection in relation to the intensities of language? Words that carry ‘blood and thunder’ refer to unrestrained, exaggerated or even violent action or behaviour. For TOIVOLA-festival, restraint is put to the side, and bodies are invited to feel through the intensity of our time together.
conversing with masculinity
Kevin Fay is engaged in a long-term research project on the subjects of masculinity, feminism, language, and the body. As part of this, he offers performative reading circles called ‘conversing with masculinity’. In these, he facilitates collective reading, writing, listening, and moving to open and explore the interstices between words that refer to gender identity and expression. Concretely, by using language from the excerpts of texts written by masculinity researchers and feminists to generate poetry, songs, drawings/maps and movements, Kevin looks for how language moves in shared, repeated attempts to produce sensuous, alternative knowledges. As the work continues, Kevin gathers material from the workshops to prepare a publication and a series of performances.
About the artists
Kevin Fay
Kevin Fay (he/him/his) is a French-American artist with a B.A. in Dance and Communication Studies from Northwestern University. In the U.S., he worked professionally on classical and contemporary dance projects, and in 2016, he moved to Brussels, Belgium. As a freelance contemporary dance artist based in Brussels, he has collaborated on performance projects with Veli Lehtovaara, Éric Minh Cuong Castaing, Eleanor Bauer, Marc Vanrunxt, Fabrice Samyn, Olga de Soto and Marco Berrettini. Also, he has studied voice with Fabienne Seveillac and contributed to various publications as writer, editor, and transcriber. With residency support and a research scholarship from The Flemish Authorities (2020 – 2021), Kevin has an ongoing research project called ‘conversing with masculinity’. In this, he organises open, performative reading circles, he leads movement workshops and he develops choreography. He has taught professionally in both the U.S. and Europe (KASK, Tanzquartier Wien, Impulstanz, Charleroi Danse – La Raffinerie), and he will premiere jugular in BUDA’s Almost Summer festival in June 2026.
Guillaume Soula. Photo by Flavio Karrer.
Guillaume Soula
Guillaume Soula is a French composer and sound engineer working for theatre, dance companies, radio, installations, music and movie productions. His work is presented at Theater Neumarkt (Zurich – CH), New York Live Arts (New York – US), FourOneOne (New York – US), Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston – US), REDCAT / CalArts Theater (Los Angeles – US), OZ Arts (Nashville – US), Jacob’s Pillow (Becket – US), Philadelphia Fringe / FringeArts (Philadelphia – US), Carolina Performing Arts (Chapel Hill – US), The Blackwood (Toronto – CA), Festival TransAmeriques (Montreal – CA), Helsinki Biennial 2025 (Helsinki – FIN), Teatro do Bairro Alto (Lisbon – PT), Teatro Municipal do Porto Rivoli (Porto – PT), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels – BEL), Festival d’Automne / CentQuatre (Paris – FR), Le Paradis – Galerie Verbale (Périgueux – FR), Fréquence FRAC (Corsica – FR), Festival de Marseille (Marseille – FR), Epidaurus Festival (Athens – GR), Julidans (Amsterdam – NL), Autumn Meteorite Festival (Tokyo – JP).
Cover image: Kevin Fay. Photo by Arnaud Beelen.