Stir Q&A: The Biting School explores darkness and deception in Empty-Handed
The new contemporary-dance work launches the Firehall Arts Centre’s 2024-25 season
Empty-Handed. Photo by Luciana Freire D’Anunciação
The Firehall Arts Centre presents Empty-Handed from October 2 to 5
DARKNESS, DECEPTION, AND greed: These are themes that run through Empty-Handed, a new contemporary dance piece by The Biting School that is opening the Firehall Arts Centre’s 2024-25 season. The work, co-produced with battery opera, explores the journeys of five cosmic characters through movement and storytelling, while audience members are invited to leave something behind from their past: written-down thoughts of things that aren’t serving them anymore. A bold colour palette, theatrical lighting, original music composition, and imaginative projection design all enhance the satirical commentary on the haunting subject matter. Stir connected with The Biting School co-artistic director and choreographer Arash Khakpour to find out more.
What is the backstory to Empty-Handed? What inspired it?
We get to come into this world empty-handed, and it is wise to know that we will leave empty-handed. Empty-Handed is about facing the greed that drives our human choices in life. Empty-Handed, for me, is an attempt to get closer to our own essence. An attempt to find the deeper, broken fragments of ourselves. An attempt to get closer to the other. When we are present with the other, the truth appears. It turns out that when we get closer to ourselves we see the other, and I realize that you are also me. When I hurt you I am also hurting me. When I love you, I am also loving me. It is about the acceptance of death. It is only through that acceptance that I learn to choose life. It’s about giving into the eternal life. The real story remains to be seen and felt when the audience is in the theatre with us.
Viewers are welcome to leave something behind that becomes part of the show. Can you tell us more about what this will look like?
The audience will be invited to write down something personal to their own life narrative that they want to surrender that night. Something that isn’t serving them anymore. They will be asked to commit to it by writing it down and bringing it into the room. They will have the space to sit with that specific narrative they wrote down for the duration of the show.
How would you describe the movement?
The movement has a huge range in this piece. It is at times very subtle and meditative and at times intense and virtuosic. The nature of this piece needed a range of styles and ways of moving which also makes use of dancers’ expertise. We each move in our own specific ways that reflects our personalities in the piece, and bring in our own textures into the characterizations within the work.
Is there anything else about the show you would like people to know?
We are sitting in the madness of the human experience, forgetting we are the guests that the daffodils invited in a long time ago. We are sitting in stillness and finding the trails, the trails that will eventually take us home.
I would love to invite the audience to enjoy the piece to the fullest and want to leave them with a quote from one my favour film directors of all time, Alejandro Jodorowsky: “When you find love, real love, it’s like a catastrophe, like a tsunami. Like an earthquake, because all your individuality, all what you believed you are, it’s breaking. And you are completely another person. You never know what you were. And it’s a catastrophe –but a good catastrophe, not a bad catastrophe.” 
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