She's at home when on stage

OLGA LIVSHIN

Vancouver performer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg is a theatre all by herself. Versatile and passionate, this beautiful woman with huge brown eyes is a dancer and a mime, an actress and a writer, a choreographer and a costume designer. She is also a yoga instructor. Her company is called Tara Cheyenne Performance and it all started with a ballet class when she was three.

Ballet provided the technical foundation for Cheyenne's future work but it was too restricted to express her artistic vision. She needed a wider range of creative tools. She needed words. After graduating from high school in 1990, she enrolled in the University of Calgary, with a major in theatre and a minor in dance. Later, she completed her study at Simon Fraser University, this time majoring in dance.

Dance was always her language of choice, the main vehicle she used to arrive at her esthetic destinations, although she often leaned towards collaboration with other art forms. Searching for her own dramatic voice, the young dancer performed and choreographed for different dance and theatrical troupes in British Columbia, worked for Green Thumb Theatre for a while, but her insatiable curiosity drove her towards widening her artistic horizons. She stayed for two years in Chile, working and studying yoga. When she came back in 2000, she finally knew what she wanted to do.

She founded her own dance company, with one dancer – herself – and started choreographing and performing solo pieces throughout British Columbia and Canada. Following the dancers of old, she performs using her first and middle names – Tara Cheyenne – as her trademark.

By 2008, her creations have grown in length and complexity, from seven minutes to full-length ballets that use spoken word as well as movement to deliver the author's messages. They also grew in popularity. In 2005, Cheyenne's 56-minutes show bANGER, The Power Hour was the winner of the People's Choice Award at the Dancing on the Edge Festival. It was also listed as one of the Vancouver Sun's best shows of 2006 and represented Canada at the London International Festival of Theatre in 2008.

In bANGER, Cheyenne plays a teenager full of angst and awkwardness, searching for his place in the universe, banging his head in frustration. Starting out as a girl, he is transformed by a costume he dons on stage, the costume that outlines a masculine stereotype. "I like to play with costumes," said Cheyenne. "We frequently judge people by what they wear, especially in high school. Quite often, that judgment is a mistake."

Full of subtle humor and an understanding of teenage woes, bANGER has met with success everywhere. Adult and adolescent audiences laugh and applaud at the hero's antics, at his recognizable "otherness." Sometimes, she said, teenagers approach her after the performance, saying, "I know such a boy. I thought he was jerk. I should be nicer to him now," or even, "That's me. Thank you."

"The audience is part of the performance, like another actor," she said. "By their reaction, I see what works and what doesn't, so the show is always evolving, fluid. On the other hand, it is important to keep true to my artistic vision."

The show bANGER started a string of Cheyenne's full-length productions. The next one, Nick & Juanita – Livin' in My Dreams, is a 75-minutes show, where the dancer plays two diametrically opposite roles, divided by the intermission. As in bANGER, here, too, the costumes play pivotal roles, underscoring the personalities. Nick, a man who thinks of himself as suave, charming bloke, is in reality a sleazy, pathetic braggart. The dancer is perfect in this role, sharing with her public Nick's loneliness, his misplaced bravado and his cheap push to belong.

Juanita, the opposite of Nick, is a naïve, stupid woman, longing for love. Existing in her surreal dreams, she is ready to believe anyone. There is not much make up involved in these two characters except their different ways of movement and their costumes. "I put on different characters simultaneously with their clothing. It's a fascinating challenge," Cheyenne said. She admitted that she often finds costumes for her heroes in thrift stores, although Juanita's dress is actually her own graduation dress. "It still fits me!" she exclaimed with laughter.

A bone-deep desire for acceptance seems to be a common theme for this writer's characters, although they wear different guises. "I like to observe people," she said. "My shows usually start with a character, and then a story develops around it." Comedy, tragedy and social satire interconnect in Cheyenne's on-stage personages, inviting her public to laugh first, and then to think, to evaluate their own perceptions.

The tendency to share her heart and to teach, which is palpable in her shows, spills outside into her life. Besides teaching yoga once a week, Cheyenne also mentors young dancers, helping ease their transition from school to the professional world of dance. In addition, she is a co-director of Move It! together with Joe Laughlin. The program is designed to teach dance to everyone: young, old, disabled. Cheyenne enjoys offering her students a chance to dance. "People from all walks of life participate in it," she said. "They bond in dance. It changes the cultural fabric of their lives."

Inspired by her imagination and her thirst for new, experimental theatre, Cheyenne explores human diversity in her own unique, composite style, using the avant-garde relationship between words and movement.

Cheyenne is participating in the PuSh festival, performing a new show, Live from a Bush of Ghosts, which is going to be performed Feb. 4-15 at Studio 16 (www.ticketstonight.ca or 604-684-2787 for tickets). She is busy planning an international tour.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer.

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