Soili Huhtakallio is a choreographer, contemporary dancer, and producer who works between the precision of gesture and the wildness of sensation. Her practice moves through the body's gravitational intelligence and traces how thought, emotion, and awareness become visible in movement.
She creates collaborative works that explore embodied knowledge, often with group choreographies or participatory forms. Current projects include Ennoia, part of the ongoing Wind Etudes series, Blaa Blaa, a choreography for twelve to sixteen dancers shaped by the effects of speech and the music of Max Richter, and Mechanosphere, a new solenoid grid installation with the Mechanit Project, examining nervous system regulation. With the Energpriests collective, she is also developing Meeting the Universe Halfway, a participatory performance experience, with the working title borrowed from Karen Barad’s book with the same name. Her work has been presented in Zodiak, Theatre Universum and music festivals like Barokki Kuopio and Time of Music.
Trained in dance since the age of four and shaped by decades of practice across styles, Soili holds a BA in Dance and an MA in Choreography from Uniarts Helsinki, where she graduated in 2016. She has worked with choreographers such as Kirsi Monni, Petri Kekoni and Sonja Jokiniemi, and a collaborative article with Aliina Lindroos has been published in Uniarts Helsinki’s publication series. She has received half- and full-year artist grants from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland. Irish dance remains her enduring hobby and a counter-rhythm to her daily practice.
Currently, we are facilitating Guided Body Meditations. It is an easy-access concept combining elements of contemporary movement and dance classes, GaGa, and different yoga and meditation traditions. All this is fused to a session after which the participants hopefully feel more in their bodies and are in tune with their feelings.
Have you been in our events lately? We lust to hear what you thought about it!
Energpriests is a movement laboratory, and it’s a supremely substantial part of what I do and how I do it.
I initiated Energpriests in 2017 with dance artists Krista-Julia Arppo, Anni Koskinen, Meeri Lempiäinen, Salla Rytövuori, Pauliina Sjöberg and Katriina Tavi to be able to share ideas and think collectively about our experiences as women in movement, dance and art.
One of the aims was to create flexible artistic concepts, that can be performed in different contexts and platforms with a variety of 2-7 of us. I wanted to make an effort to make us more independent by finding resilient ways to monetise the immense embodied knowledge we found ourselves with after years of embodied education.
I also wanted to find a way to develop ideas that are not only for a specific performance but for the larger goal of learning together, learning to gather information through the body and learning to share this by creating performative experiences, that are accessible also to people not coming from a dance background.
The whole project is political in the sense that it puts forward embodied experiences of women, which are traditionally not seen as reasonable motivators for rational action or principals guiding social organisation.