Dance review: The Biting School's double bill swings from pensive to playful
Kelly McInnes’s Blue Space and Melon Piece by Arash Khakpour are wildly different in their moods
Kelly McInnes in Blue Space. Photo by Sophia Wolfe
The Biting School presents Blue Space + Melon Piece to March 5 at the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre.
THERE ARE MOMENTS in Blue Space and Melon Piece that evoke primal urges and gut-wrenching emotional pain. But the solo dance works are otherwise a world apart.
Kelly McInnes’s Blue Space is a meditation on our connection to water—from that which makes up our bodies to the global ocean that is in deep danger. Performing naked, the dancer-choreographer reminds that water is everywhere and is everything through movement that is by turns fluid and torrential.
There’s a huge sheet of white plastic that hangs from above and stretches across the stage, ultimately swallowing her up. Wrapped within it, McInnes tumbles and rolls all over the floor, like a tiny object being tossed by turbulent waves. Her struggle evokes that of so much marine and bird life that is threatened, or worse, by plastic pollution, most vividly illustrated when the seagull she has personified—crouched down low, with tilts of her head and screeches of the sort you’ve never heard come from a human body—ends up gagging on and vomiting pieces of shredded plastic.
From water’s healing effects to its role in rituals to its life-giving force, McInnes reminds that we come from water—and that we forget or neglect that fact to our peril.
Arash Khakpour in Melon Piece. Photo by Luciana D'Anunciacao
Contrasting the contemplative feel of Blue Space is Arash Khakpour’s bright and splashy Melon Piece. The co-founder (with his brother, Aryo) of The Biting School is quite frankly adorable when, after making his way to centre-stage from the Roundhouse’s exterior door—dressed in a red onesie with matching hat, pair of those goofy oversize glasses you find at party photo booths, and wacky whistle clenched in his teeth—he empties a potato sack full of watermelons onto the floor and stops to flash a big smile to the audience. Through fierce physical comedy, he goes on to tell a LOL-funny tale without saying a word, all through that whistle; “speaking” into a watermelon-red-coloured rotary-phone, he has a heated conversation with someone, stomping back and forth, quashing all but one melon with his feet. Just imagine the Roundhouse stage literally covered in the fruit, flesh and rind spewed everywhere; we could smell its summertime scent in the audience.
From there, Khakpour goes full-on slapstick, sliding and spinning breakdance-like on the slippery floor. But Melon Piece is not all light and laughter. Sometimes it’s carnal, and then there are instances where he bursts with anger—at the world? His own failings?—the fruit becoming the object of his frustration.
If there’s a downside to the work, it’s that it gives us merely a taste of Khakpour’s capacity for compelling, kinetic movement; we’re left hungry for more.
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