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.”

Featured

Gail Johnson

Gail Johnson is cofounder and associate editor of Stir. She is a Vancouver-based journalist who has earned local and national nominations and awards for her work. She is a certified Gladue Report writer via Indigenous Perspectives Society in partnership with Royal Roads University and is a member of a judging panel for top Vancouver restaurants.

Articles

Ry Jackson and Reed Jackson connect to their roots in Stump, as part of All Over the Map series

Presented by New Works, the dance piece will draw inspiration from natural surroundings on Granville Island

Co.ERASGA, Action at a Distance, Plastic Orchid Factory, and more as Dance Centre unveils a 2025-26 season with local names

Offerings also include world premieres from Corporeal Imago and FakeKnot, plus Ame Henderson + Matija Ferlin’s Show Gone

The Dance Deck marks its 10th anniversary at the Eastside Arts Festival, starting July 19

Belle Spirale’s backyard shindig features performances by Action at a Distance’s Vanessa Goodman, Paper Rabbits collective, Ballet BC dancers, and more

A Punjabi play, an enlightening salon series, and more as Monsoon Festival of Performing Arts unveils 2025 lineup

This year’s event, on from August 7 to 17, also features a standup comedy show by YouTube star Manpreet Singh and all-ages dance workshops

At Indian Summer Festival, Simran Sachar embodies her mother’s dancing with lightning-like presence

Waacking-infused world premiere co-created with Justine A. Chambers draws on a 1990 indie Bollywood film choreographed by Sachar’s mom

Metro Vancouver's Canada Day celebrations span live music, parades, and all-day parties

Performances by the Wild Moccasin Dancers, jazz trumpeter Feven Kidane, party band Dr. Strangelove, and plenty more artists are in store

New Works and Rainbow Refugee Society honour Pride Month with reflections on an impactful dance collaboration

Artists Kevin Jesuino and Marco Esccer worked with LGBTQI+ society members to create an empowering dance performance that told their truths

Arts Umbrella invites young artists to join this year's Summer Dance Intensives throughout July

Offerings are designed to suit dancers of varying ages and abilities, from the inaugural ISDI2 program to intensives for Juniors and Teens

The Dance Centre serves up bite-sized works-in-progress at 12 Minutes Max studio showing, June 23

Presentation features genre-spanning pieces by Aditi Chaudhury and Sudnya Mulye, Jhoely Triana Flamenco, Jullianna Oke, and Krystal Tsai

Dance review: Opening Edge programs generate big intensity in a small space

Repetition, endurance, and ritual from Noam Gagnon, Lesley Telford, Rebecca Margolick, and Tushrik Fredericks

Bodies drape softly over metal ladders in Lurch, at Dancing on the Edge

The MascallDance production uses a large set piece to unite three distinct pieces by different choreographers

Dance review: Sculptural slo-mo and frenetic rush as Sloth Canon unpacks today’s punishing pace

With arresting dancers and haunting atmosphere, Company 605 and T.H.E Dance Company cocreation grapples with big, timely ideas

Stir Cheat Sheet: 3 works worth catching at the Dancing on the Edge festival

Studies in math and an industrial fan are just some of the unexpected touches on the event’s mixed programs

Stir Q&A: Tushrik Fredericks and Rebecca Margolick talk trust and spirituality at Dancing on the Edge

Intimate duet to begin with no end explores the artists’ respective religions with care and intensity

Vancouver-Singapore collaboration Sloth Canon captures drive to build more, faster

Company 605 and T.H.E Dance Company push cross-Pacific team of dancers to embody a society rushing toward the next thing, at the Scotiabank Dance Centre

In HAUS of YOLO, New Zealand–based circus artists let their freak flags fly

The Dust Palace’s cabaret send-up stars a visionary fashion designer who sews costumes live onstage at The Cultch

Luciana Freire D’Anunciação’s multiscreen video installation Becoming explores the cyclical nature of life

Canadian-Brazilian interdisciplinary artist brings together film and dance in a work that can be enjoyed from different angles at the Roundhouse

Dance review: A bold survey of contemporary movement at Arts Umbrella Season Finale

Marco Goecke, Crystal Pite, Sharon Eyal, and Fernando Magadan provide a whirlwind of short work for tomorrow’s next dance stars

Club Origami's folded paper allows kids' imaginations to flourish at Vancouver International Children’s Festival

Presented with Boca del Lupo, the accessible production by the U.K.’s Seven Circles encourages interactive learning

A Simple Space serves up acrobatic feats without the sequins, at the Kay Meek Arts Centre May 22

Aussie troupe Gravity & Other Myths’ stripped-down spectacle has been a hit around the world

Inverso Productions' LIFT festival brings generations together through dance

Senior dance artists offer decades of insight to the new event’s joyful collaborations with younger performers

Ballet BC announces 2025-26 season, complete with a Jiří Kylián work and new Saturday matinees

Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber share a full-evening work, and hit productions of Crystal Pite’s Frontier and Shahar Binyamini’s BOLERO X return

With Arts Umbrella's Season Finale, Rena Narumi returns to source of artistic independence and community

In the midst of an international career, the Kidd Pivot dancer is setting a short Crystal Pite work for the student showcase

Dancing on the Edge unveils program full of local works by the likes of MascallDance and Ziyian Kwan, June 12 to 21

Moroccan and Spanish choreographers join the international contingent of event that runs at Firehall Arts Centre and SFU Woodward’s

Seeds of Resistance honours the vibrant legacy of Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos

With the Vancouver Latin American Cultural Centre, artists Marco Esccer and Carla Alcántara celebrate the centenary of the feminist writer’s birth

Dance review: Love in all its complexity at Ballet BC’s season-closing DUSK

Powerful dancing across the board in Medhi Walerski’s striking Last light; Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber’s straight-from-the-heart Obsidian; and Marco Goecke’s vibrating Woke Up Blind

Hong Kong Exile tunes into celestial stories at the Vancouver Art Gallery, May 15

As part of Asian Heritage Month, the gallery’s first performers-in-residence use old-school radios and headlamps in a new piece that fuses dance, multimedia, and theatre