Kevin Fay - conversing with masculinity

Kevin Fay is a French-American dancer, writer and choreographer. In this residency, he continues research done in 'conversing with masculinity' sessions, and he refines his choreographic tools.

Specifically, with attention to sensitivity and sense-making, Kevin addresses subtext and interstices - spaces between feeling, interpreting and speaking - to understand how choreography can facilitate intimacy in public. Indeed, throughout residencies this year, Kevin addresses the intensities of language from the position of the dancer.

With rigor, patience and openness, he ingests languages that are not his (e.g. reading the news, studying theory, scrolling through social media, practicing technical dancing), engages with somatic practice to listen, absorb, reflect and respond (e.g. pranayama poetries, fasciatherapy movement meditations that lead to supple, fluid storytelling), and he asks what his dances would say if they could speak. Choreographer Eleanor Bauer inspired him to understand dancing as a unique kind of synaesthesia - accessing multiple, skilled intelligences at once.

As a result, Kevin doesn't consider language as strictly a communicative tool. Instead, he explores it as a landscape that captures, extends and sometimes misses the diverse, profound sensations that come from being in a body.

Accompanying this work is French composer, field recordist and sound engineer Guillaume Soula. Together, Guillaume and Kevin imagine palpable perceptual geographies where text and sound layer, slide, fray and meld. Multiple languages move inside the work they're creating (e.g. 'blood and thunder', 2025), and the way that movement, sound, and text shift and relate to one another creates something sensuous - a space where words are not the priority, the connection between language and somatic awareness is.

Kevin Fay trained at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL, U.S.A., B.A. Dance & Communication), the Hubbard Street Dance Center, and the Ruth Page Foundation School of Dance.

After working professionally in classical and contemporary dance companies and projects, he moved to Brussels, BE. Based in Brussels since 2016, he has collaborated as a dancer with Veli Lehtovaara, Éric Minh Cuong Castaing, Eleanor Bauer & Chris Peck, Marc Vanrunxt – Kunst/Werk, Fabrice Samyn, Manon Santkin, Adrian Kurth, Olga de Soto, Marco Berrettini, and La Monnaie/De Munt. Since 2017, he has been studying voice with Fabienne Seveillac and developing his work as a writer, editor and transcriber.

Finally, with support from The Flemish Authorities (research scholarship, 2020 - 2021), he's organized and facilitated 'conversing with masculinity' workshops in RoSa vzw, wpZimmer, BUDA, KASK, Liminal, Charleroi Danse - La Raffinerie and Tanzquartier Wien (2020 - present). In August 2025, alongside Anna Leon, Andrew Champlin and Elizabeth Ward, he facilitated 'bad ballet', a weeklong research project at Impulstanz.

Kevin will be joined by Guillaume Soula (sound), Simon Baetens (dramaturgy), Miguel Peñaranda Olmeda (costumes/scenography) and Marc Vanrunxt and Veli Lehtovaara (outside eyes) while in residencies at STUK.