Vancouver contemporary dancers Kelly McInnes and Arash Khakpour feel that their careers have been on parallel tracks.

Many years ago, they trained together in the Modus Operandi dance program for young emerging professionals. Back then, McInnes and Khakpour were eager to get their careers underway, which led them to collaborate on a duet.

“We’ve been growing alongside each other as artists,” McInnes tells the Straight over Zoom. “Definitely for me, I’ve been really inspired by the work that Arash has been doing.”

Khakpour is cofounder, along with his brother Aryo, of The Biting School, which they describe as “a meeting ground for dance, theatre, and performance art”. With the return of live performances, it seemed natural for Khakpour to present a double bill of solos of works by him and McInnes.

“I have a history of…learning from her work and her bravery and openness,” Khakpour says on the same Zoom call.

Khakpour will present Melon Piece, a bewitching work in which the very bendable dancer struggles—almost like a puppet on a string—to reach an elusive watermelon on the other side of the floor.

It premiered a decade ago, but Khakpour has reworked it to reflect how he has evolved since then. He describes Melon Piece as being like a movable painting with multiple characters.

“There are all these layers of myself that I want to share,” Khakpour says. “And I want to have a short story for each layer, or each perception, of myself in the world.”

To him, Melon Piece is a commentary on how human beings communicate in the world by presenting different facets of themselves. The performance reflects this in the relationship that his characters have with the watermelon.

He points out that watermelons, like people, are very different and usually far more interesting on the inside than they appear to be on the surface.

Khakpour actually has a cultural and emotional connection to this fruit.

At the age of 14, he immigrated to Canada from Iran, where he recalls staying up on the longest night of the year, eating watermelons and pomegranate seeds and sharing stories and reciting poetry. He still misses those occasions.

“It’s got that aspect to it as well,” Khakpour says. “That longing and the extreme loss that I felt is part of the piece.”

Extreme loss also bubbles to the surface in McInnes’s Blue Space, which she choreographed in 2019. It was born out of grief for the state of a planet in turmoil due to runaway greenhouse gas emissions.

“I think a lot about extinction and just the fact that [many] animals literally don’t exist anymore,” McInnes says. “I was feeling a lot of complexity of emotions around that.”

She points out that there’s a constant onslaught of media coverage about the climate breakdown, but she doesn’t feel that there are many spaces where people can absorb the magnitude of this. And that, she feels, is leading to a great deal of disassociation.

This isn’t McInnes’s first exploration of the ecological crisis. Another show, Mine, explored consumption and memory through the clothes that we wear. Two° revolved around humanity’s inability to make the necessary changes to keep the average global temperature increase since pre-industrial times at a livable level.

McInnes says that she vocalizes how she’s feeling in Blue Space, which includes a big piece of plastic on-stage that transforms into different things.

“One other thing is I am kind of shapeshifting between woman and animal and child and womb,” she adds. “I feel like there’s a lot of different things I’m embodying in the work.”

McInnes worked on Blue Space as she was beginning training in craniosacral therapy. And that has helped her move toward a more hopeful outlook on the world.

“There’s a lot of really beautiful things in the practice relating to the embryological processes and the ways that we are fluid bodies,” she states. “We are constantly evolving and changing.”

She also feels that craniosacral therapy helps people connect to the fact that we are all, ultimately, animals.

“I’m also doing research about how being around water is very healing for us as animals,” McInnes adds. “It kind of puts our brains—our nervous system—into a more regulated and introspective place.”

This manifests itself in the show in the transition from intense moments of exploring the reality of the climate crisis to shifting to calmer states in which the audience hears the sound of the ocean or sees images of water.

“It’s sensation-based,” McInnes emphasizes. “It feels very sensorial.”