Soup Talks is a series of informal conversations with the artists presenting their work during the festival. The talks form a discursive line that goes through the festival and brings people together. We want to welcome the audience and the artists around a big table with a bowl of warm soup. Everybody is invited to join in, to listen, to pose questions and to take part in the discussions. Each of the talks will be hosted by an artist based in the Helsinki area.

 

3.11.2023 
Performance Bacchae – prelude to a purge
Guest: Marlene Monteiro Freitas
Host: Elina Pirinen

 

4.11.2023 
Performance Poet in my – my life as Fabou
Guests: Ella Skoikka & working group  
Host: Masi Tiitta

 
5.11.2023
Performance Data Ocean Theatre/Tragedy and the Goddexxes  
Guest: Vincent Roumagnac
Host: Sara Grotenfelt

 
6.11.2023
Performance MIKE 
Guest: Dana Michel
Host: Marika Peura

 
7.11.2023
Performance Save the last dance for me 
Guest:  Giovanfrancesco Giannini  
Host: Nina Vurdelja

 
8.11.2023 HUOM! @ Goethe-Institut
Performance SCORES THAT SHAPED OUR FRIENDSHIP 
Guests: Lucy Wilke, Paweł Duduś & Kim Ramona Ranalter
Hosts: Riina Hannuksela & Aku Meriläinen

 
9.11.2023 
Performance HORDE 
Guests: Solveig Styve Holte, Amie Mbye & Sofia Charifi 
Host: Samuli Emery

 
10.11.2023 
Performance Submission Submission
Guest: Bryana Fritz
Host: Simo Kellokumpu
 

11.11.2023 
Performance Venus
Guest: Janina Rajakangas & Mea Holappa
Host: Joel Teixeira Neves
 

12.11.2023  
Performance DARKMATTER
Guests: Cherish Menzo & Camilo Mejía Cortés
Host: Edit Williams

 

20.12.2023 @ Eläintarhan huvila
Finnish artist, choreographer and performer Lin Da’s Life Long Burning residency in Uferstudios Berlin
In the Soup Talk together with Lin Da will converse Laura Pietiläinen

 

Elina Pirinen

Elina Pirinen, born in North Carelia, lives in Helsinki and by the lake Kalliojärvi with her husband, daughter, Russian blue queen cat and young lapland reindeer dog. Her artistry and practice is entangled in choreography, dancing, music making, experimental writing, pedagogy and psychodynamic-feminism. She loves working with the instrument of a live stage, recorded audio and lyrics/poetry. Pirinen thinks about the living and the dying bodies and their queer states when she creates. She has been passionately researching the subconscious registers, hardcore primary affections and intelligence through them, constructing psychic, feministic, transgressive and romantic inner and outer milieu. She seeks for energy of consolation, hope, a connection with the audience. Her works have toured all around the world. Pirinen regularly works as a visiting pedagogue at the Uniarts Helsinki’s Theater Academy, the Degree Programme in Theatre Arts at the University of Tampere, Zodiak – Center for New Dance,  interdisciplinary summer academy Sukset Ristiin Susirajalla and The Academy of Music and Theatre in Vilnius. Side by staging she makes art rock music and does volunteer work with animal protection. 

Masi Tiitta

Masi Tiitta works as a choreographer, director, performer and dramaturg and as a member of working groups in the fields of new dance and contemporary performance. His work has been presented across the contexts of dance, live art and visual arts, for example at Helsinki City Theatre’s Stage for Contemporary Performance, Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival, Contemporary Art Space Kutomo and Zodiak – Center for New Dance.

Sara Grotenfelt

Sara Grotenfelt is a choreographer, performance-maker and performer based in Helsinki, Finland. Lately Sara’s works have focused on tweaking the social and aesthetic conventions of the performance situation. Her work has been shown at e.g. Helsinki City Theatre’s Stage for Contemporary Performance, Hangö teaterträff, Zodiak Stage and Taidehalli. As a performer she has collaborated with WAUHAUS, Sari Palmgren, Anna-Sofia Nylund and Blaue Frau amongst others. Sara also works as a co-director at the dance school Tanssivintti which offers intensive programmes for young dancers aspiring to engage in dance as an art form. She holds a Master’s degree in choreography from the Theatre Academy of Helsinki and a Bachelor’s degree equivalent from DASPA, Copenhagen. 

Marika Peura

Marika Peura is a choreographer and dancer based in Helsinki. She works multidisciplinary in the fields of dance, contemporary performing arts and commercial productions. Peura graduated from Uniarts Helsinki in 2020. She has a long practice in street & club dance culture. Peura works with the the emotional, poetic and political landscapes that unfolds from the experientiality of the body. Her last work was centered around intimacy of the dancing body; studying the emotional, sensual, sexual and social energies from the intersection of club/rave dance & culture and contemporary choreography. In her upcoming work she is researching and re-imagining the question of intimacy in the relationship with her mother.

Nina Vurdelja

Nina Vurdelja is a performance researcher and cultural worker active across disciplines and geographies, based in Finland. Her interests reside around more-than-human sensuous encounters and ecologies of being together. She is a Phd Candidate at Doctoral school for Communication, Media and Performing Arts at Tampere University, dwelling in meeting spaces between culture, art, and philosophy. 

Riina Hannuksela

Riina Hannuksela is a doctoral candidate in dance at the Centre for Performing Arts Research at Theatre Academy in UniArts Helsinki. In her dissertation, she explores how we could expand the notion of a dancer and a dance to diversify the representation on stage. Before her doctoral research, she worked for over a decade in dance as a performer, facilitator, and teacher. She is particularly interested in community dance as a way to practice co-existing with others. She has established and is still facilitating the artistic processes of Ihanat Dance Company, a company for dancers with and without intellectual disabilities. A dance film trilogy Gen Z (dir. Kati Kallio) created with Ihanat Dance Company premiered earlier this year and is touring internationally at dance film festivals. In recent years, she has also worked as an artist-researcher in ELLA – Embodied Language Learning through the Arts (2021–2024) research project (funded by Kone Foundation) and is currently chairing the Community Dance Association in Finland. Riina is frequently invited to present and teach nationally on accessibility and inclusivity in the arts.  

Aku Meriläinen

Aku Meriläinen (they/he) is a media artist and doctoral researcher who develops practices beyond the normative expectations in works that integrate digital technologies and performing arts. 
At the moment they are interested in combining artistic processes with new technologies to identify discriminatory cultural features from the crip perspective. 

Samuli Emery

Samuli considers themselves a Finnish-British queer art maker from Jyväskylä, who happens to have a complicated but touchingly obsessive relationship to dancing. Samuli crafts performative situations, invites people together into generative and empowering spaces and practices loving ways to remain housed in one’s body. Samuli longs for the collapse of bourgeoisie tendencies in Western staged contemporary dance while craving joyous, epic and absurd shared senses of being alive. 

In 2019 she completed a formal Western “contemporary” dance education at SEAD Salzburg with a major in choreography. During his studies at SEAD he got to perform in the works of many acclaimed artists such as Wim Vandekeybus, Julyen Hamilton and Milan Tomašik. Additionally, Samuli completed an exchange program at the renowned Tisch School of the Arts in New York in 2018. They have also immersed themselves in several Afro-American street and club dance cultures and the Ballroom scene which shape and inform their artistic practice profoundly. 

Samuli has worked internationally with artists like Meg Stuart, Jerome Bel, Imre & Marne Van Opstal, Christoph Winkler, River Lin, Jill Crovisier, Gloria Höckner, Barnaby Booth and Ceren Oran. Samuli has received numerous awards and stipends for their accomplishments as a performer and maker in Finland, Germany, Poland, Estonia and Italy. Additionally she creates her own work, ranging from intimate solos to video works to huge community dance pieces and teaches internationally. 

Simo Kellokumpu

Simo Kellokumpu is a choreographer, performer, researcher and lecturer in the MA in Dance performance program at the University of the Arts, Helsinki. From 2013 to 2019, Simo has conducted the artistic research project ’Choreography as Reading Practice’ at the Centre for Performing Arts Research at the University of the Arts, Tutke and has worked with post-doctoral artistic research project xeno/exo/astro –choreoreadings in 2020-2022. Simo’s multidisciplinary artistic work explores the choreographic relations between corporeality and materiality in the intertwining of space culture, hyper-reading, speculative fiction and site-specificity. 

Joel Teixeira Neves

Director and performance artist Joel Teixeira Neves (TeM) works in the field of performance art, theater and dance. In Teixeira Neves’s artistic work, place-relatedness and direct interaction between the moment of the performance and the audience are emphasized.

Edit Williams

Edit Williams (1996) is a Guinean-Finnish student in her last year of bachelor’s degree in the Swedish acting program at the theatre academy of Helsinki. Williams has been actively involved in various theatre productions both within and outside the academy in projects that involve multiple languages such as Swedish, Finnish and English. As she approaches the end of her degree program, she will be continuing her master’s degree in acting and she hopes to use her skills to create and/or participate in meaningful productions that involve important perspectives from the BIPOC community in the industry, artistic influences and political views. She also wants to encourage others from the BIPOC community to take space in a room that has not been designed for them, especially in the theatre and film industry and especially for the younger generation. 

Lin Da

Lin Da (aka Lin Martikainen) is a Helsinki-based artist, choreographer and performer whose work focuses on observing ecologies of life, touch and encounters with the sense of unreadiness. Lin explores the relationships between beings and their vicinity in dialogues between human bodies and more-than-humans in different contexts. Their works are realized in many different forms, from installations to dance performances and from audio works to sculptures. The combining web between the works is choreographic thinking.

Lin works independently and in collaboration with artists from different fields. Their process-oriented practice utilizes a wide range of techniques and approaches and aims to create art that pushes and redefines the boundaries of the choreographic framework in the form of sound, moving image, installation, performances and events, among others. The venues and contexts of Lin’s works are diverse: they have been exhibited and performed in private residences, public urban spaces, galleries and stage spaces. Their latest project Aukeama – Opening space (2023) intersects with dance, visual arts and performance art. The multi-staged body of work was carried out together with volunteers and included, among other things, a choreographic installation and a dance performance, Napapiiri – Navel Circle. The volunteers had responded to an open invitation letter welcoming queer people to apply to be part of the creation of the MFA thesis project that circled around the navel, touch and movement. Lin has continued to work with the openings of the body, focusing on working with LGBTQIA+ people in a safer space context for semiotics and somatics to bloom, pollinate and transform.

Laura Pietiläinen

Laura Pietiläinen’s journey from the choreography studies at the Theater University since 2005 has initially moved from surrealist stage works to personal encounters with the audience, to darkness, making sensory performances, to scenographic starting points, transporting the audience on moving stages and urban nature, to other spaces, to art research and aesthetic studies, to detaching oneself from other thinkers and collective bubbles, to opera works, to combining the organic expression of classical song and dance, to making costumes, to dressing rooms and Juntta in Ylioppilasteatteri, to the basement and to the woods, to the creation of a drag show dance group, to Kuumat putket, to a concert-like stage spectacle, to the desire to break away from the stage, to fashion shows, to courtyards and streets, to concert halls, churches, galleries and clubs , to ritualistic and transformative performances combining visual art, fashion clothes, music and scents, fashion, music and dance videos, new-age painterly choreographies in video works, series of miniature performances, ever new changes and step by step towards freedom.