What People Are Saying

She's at home when on stage

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
Vancouver freelance writer. January 30, 2009

Dances for a Small Stage (Program A): from subtle to sassy

The dangers of reviewing for Plank or Dances for a Small Stage

"On the opposite end of the spectrum, there was no subtlety with Tara Cheyenne Friedendberg's piece entitled Melissa: your new youth leader, or with Meredith Kalaman and Amanda Sheather in This One's for You, Dad. The stage may have been small, but these dancers fit jumps, turns and even cartwheels into their performances. These energetic sassy dances weren't what I was expecting at Dances for a Small Stage, but they definitely did entertain."

(excerpt) Ashleigh Dalton January 24, 2009

Nick and Juanita-Livin' in my Dreams

A Tara Cheyenne Performance production. A Dancing on the Edge presentation. Directed by Sophie Yendole. At the Firehall Arts Centre on Sunday, July 8 2007.
In Nick and Juanita-Livin' in my dreams, I liked Juanita, but I was crazy about Nick.

Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg's two-act solo brings theatre and dance together in an incandescently hilarious performance.

In Act 1, which belongs to Nick, the archetypal talk-show host, Friedenberg distills TV's tropes. Addressing his studio audience, Nick speaks of the loneliness we all share, before finishing in revivalist style: "I am going to fill every last one of your black, empty, gaping, oozing, bleeding holes because I CAN!" A guest's responses to Nick's questions consist of nothing more than variations on "pleasure, challenge, humour, learning experience". Nick is all about the marketing of emotion and community-and about the desperation of showing off, a theme that implicates even Friedenberg's virtuosic performance.

Friedenberg keeps her choreographic and textual streams integrated, and delivers percussively crisp movement sequences based on Nick's phony gestures. A narrative arc emerges too, as hollowness creeps up on the popular but isolated soul.

Nick is so complex that he feels like a freshly unearthed archetype. Juanita, a lonely woman, seems less original. As Juanita waits to be saved by a handsome man in a dance hall, her story feels smaller. It's also more schematic. Nick reveals himself through interaction; Juanita explains herself by showing us a conversation between her head and her heart.

Still, once she gets going, Juanita is a hoot. Falling in love and ignoring reason, Juanita describes her heart: "Without your brain, she is in the street, playing in romantic traffic."

I would play with Nick and Juanita anytime.

Colin Thomas
The Georgia Straight, July 12 2007

VANCOUVER/DANCING ON THE EDGE FESTIVAL 2007--TARA CHEYENNE FRIEDENBERG'S NICK & JUANITA Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Local hero Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg creates very funny and very satiric solos fusing movement and text that depict well-drawn characters. Nick & Juanita is her new full-length show.

Nick, whom we meet in the first half, is an arrogant, sleazy, shallow talk show host who fancies himself the consummate lover - and Friedenberg portrays men better than they can themselves. Juanita is a sizzling Latin hot tamale who keeps falling in love with the wrong guy. Friedenberg may start with the cliché, but she keeps adding in layers of psychological and emotional depth so that these characters move far beyond the stereotypes.

Friedenberg is not only an excellent actor, she is also a very, very strong dancer. The most fascinating aspect of her work is how the very physical movement functions as subtext where her body often shows the character's words as lies.

Dancing on the Edge continues in Vancouver until Jul. 15.

Paula Citron
classical 963 fm

bANGER: The Power Hour

A Firehall Arts Centre and Ruby Slippers Theatre copresentation. At the Firehall Arts Centre on Wednesday, September 27 2006

In her newly expanded ode to a tormented high-school headbanger, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg could have easily started the work by leaping on-stage with devil horns hoisted. But the joy of bANGER: The Power Hour is watching the dance artist's stunning transformation. She instead slinks in wearing a lacy slip, offering up feminine lunges and coy gestures. After giving a tongue-in-cheek speech about gender appropriation, she slowly slides into the combat boots and khakis at the front of the stage. This show's most stunning sequence remains watching her utterly morph before our eyes into her oddball character: she becomes a painfully awkward young rocker dude, first flipping her hair back and adjusting her fly, and then lumbering into a pseudo-aggro ape walk around the stage.

You don't have to have seen Metallica live or known guys who looked straight out of a FUBAR casting call to enjoy bANGER, but it'll help you to get the insanely funny humour of Friedenberg's work. Its darker anguish speaks to a more universal high-school experience, however. Although there is spoken text and a slight narrative, the solo piece communicates mostly through movement; that's how Friedenberg contrasts the freedom of her metalhead's fantasy world with his suffocating social reality. Early on, wild air drums lead into a truly deranged segment-a flailing blur of air guitar, pelvic thrusts, and Gene Simmons-like tongue action, all set to speed guitar. That gives way to a gauntlet walk through a high-school corridor, where he can barely negotiate his way to class-slumped over, trying to be invisible but clumsily bumping into people who want to mock him.
While not "dance" in formal terms, Friedenberg's characterization is a physically exhausting, drum-solo-fast performance that's a testament to her gift for gestural observation. Building on the shorter version that showed at Dancing on the Edge and elsewhere last year, the choreographer and her long-time collaborator/director Sophie Yendole have added to their hesher's scenes of adolescent angst. An imagined subplot that has to do with his World War II obsession is also given more depth; it's a bizarre tangent into gunfire and tap-dancing, but it adds resonance. Only the ending, after such an engaging power hour, seems too understated.

James Proudfoot adds Spinal Tap-ish lighting effects and Marc Stewart creates a suitably guitar-driven soundtrack-although both could have amped it up. Then again, maybe they worried the landscape-scorching metal of modern bands like As I Lay Dying and In Flames would drive away easier-listening audience members.

But like a kick-ass rock concert, bANGER doesn't require a lot of analysis: the main thing is that Friedenberg is clearly having a riot getting into her role-and watching her, it's hard to keep those devil horns from hoisting.

Janet Smith
Georgia Straight, October 5, 2006

DANCING ON THE EDGE 2005: DANCE
Good, bad and ugly of Canadian dance

Dancing on the Edge
Festival of Contemporary Dance
Weekend Wrap

At the Firehall Arts Centre, Vancouver

Vancouver's 17th-annual Dancing on the Edge Festival, curated by producer Donna Spencer, is a mix of local and away Canadian talent that represents the good, the bad and the ugly of contemporary dance. The Edge concerts are the heart of the festival and feature two to four choreographers who together perform an hour-long program. There are also companies and choreographers who have been given their own showcases. Spencer breaks down the artists at about 60 per cent from Vancouver and 40 per cent from the rest of the country, and taken collectively, the dancesmiths are a good gauge of current pan-Canadian dance themes and styles.

Between Friday and Sunday, I saw three Edge mixed programs, two individual showcases, and one specialty program called Indigenous Dancelands, devoted to first-nations choreographers. All told, that represents 15 choreographers, with 10 based in Vancouver.

........Vancouver's talented Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg performed her deliciously clever solo bANGER, created with director Sophie Yendole, and was an instant audience favourite for good reason. She begins as a kittenish siren in sexy lingerie, and during the dance, morphs into a swaggering man in combat gear and boots, also acquiring a mustache and goatee along the way. Her premise is a skewering of the real-man mythology, and while her brilliant text and hilarious male characterization are a feminist tirade, she actually brings poignancy to the men she targets.......

Paula Citron
Tuesday, July 12, 2005 Page R3

Lift

Kate Alton & Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg
A Vancouver International Dance Festival presentation.
At the Roundhouse Community Centre

".....Rubberbandance shared a bill with local talent Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg and Toronto's Danielle Baskerville. More performance art than pure dance, Friedenberg's Lift looked at aging and the things some women do to battle it. Wearing a costume made entirely out of panty hose, she explored the ravages of plastic surgery, in one scene scooping the air in front of her belly to the sounds of a bulldozer. What stood out was just how vividly expressive Friedenberg's face and voice are, and how crucial they are to her art. She roared like a savage animal one minute, sucked her cheeks in like a Vogue model the next. In a simple yet powerful comment on getting older, she counted from one to the mid 60s, her tone sliding from toddlerlike to snarky teen then picking up speed after 30 or so, anxiety fast slipping out. No matter what she was doing, she always beguiled........"

By Gail Johnson
Publish Date: 25-Mar-2004 Georgia Straight

Frame

Chutzah! Festival 02/Dancing on the Edge 02/

"Cheyenne is a gifted actress."

Janet Smith
Georgia Straight, July 11th 2002


"The gutsiest number came from Tara Cheyenne. In Frame, she was part dancer, part actor, part comic, pulling off impressions of TV and movie starts with all the conviction of a pro. In her supershort black bodysuit and purple knee-highs, she transformed herself from alcoholic diva in Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway to vicious, cigarette-sucking Joan Crawford as depicted in Mommy Dearest. By the time she shifted into a sturdy headstand, viewers couldn't help but giggle as she moved her legs through ballet's classic positions, her black oxfords high up in the air. The SFU grad effortlessly combined disciplines, demonstrating her dramatic aplomb."

Gail Johnson
Georgia Straight, Feb.. 28th 2002

Chutzpah-Live! Chutzpah! Festival 2002

"[A] strong sassy and most creative actress who took everyone's breath away,..."
Irma Arkus

The Peak, March 10 2002

The Beckoning
(excerpt) Aug. 2002

Dances for a Small Stage 2
""unearthly...An audacious start that was as intensely watchable as it was insanely disturbing"

Janet Smith Georgia Straight, Aug. 29th 2002

The Beckoning, Feb 24th 2003
Chutzpah! Festival Vancouver BC

"The solo spoke of awakening, death, solitude, and shifted from comic to thoughtful"
Gail Johnson

Georgia Straight, Feb 27th 2003

Go anyway

Dances for a Small Stage 4

"unyeilding... the spunky and engaging artist was a dynamo."

Gail Johnson
Georgia Straight, May 2003