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Dance duo finds comedy in the serious

Despite being known principally as a dancer, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg’s relationship to comedy is equally ingrained in her history and disposition. ā€œBecause I’m a physical person, I started dancing very young, in grade school,ā€ she recalls.
0209 ARTS Empty Swimming Pool credit Wendy D Photography

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Despite being known principally as a dancer, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg’s relationship to comedy is equally ingrained in her history and disposition.

ā€œBecause I’m a physical person, I started dancing very young, in grade school,ā€ she recalls. ā€œI couldn’t sit still, so the teacher thought I was learning-disabled. In order to navigate the situation, I would do comedy routines in the classroom. I would put my hairband over my eyes – long before Geordi La Forge did it on Star Trek, I might add – and that’s how I dealt with it.ā€

Comedy and its role in our day-to-day struggle to ā€œdeal withā€ the indignities of life is central to empty.swimming.pool, a collaborative performance Friedenberg developed in collaboration with Silvia Gribaudi, a fellow dancer from Turin, Italy. It makes its world premiere as part of the 2017 Chutzpah! Festival.

Friedenberg became aware of Gribaudi when they performed separately at a festival in Edinburgh. Watching the Italian dancer perform her acclaimed A Corpo Libero, in which she comically strips down to her undergarments and shakes her body fat to the soundtrack of a hyper-dramatic operatic aria, she immediately recognized a kindred spirit. The two have since worked together numerous times, including a residency at the Scotiabank Dance Centre.

In empty.swimming.pool, the duo seeks to navigate ā€œthe role of comedy as a catalyst to questions of gender, culture, language and understandingā€ – both a somewhat ambiguous mission and a tall order. ā€œWhat kept coming up, that became the spine of the piece, is visibility and invisibility, being seen and not being seen,ā€ Friedenberg explains. ā€œWe’re both women over 40, so that becomes, ā€˜Woah! That’s a real thing!’ When I was young, I was like, ā€˜That’s not gonna happen.’ It totally was gonna happen. I have a child, so that also became a factor in how your identity is removed, culturally.

ā€œSilvia’s got a whole other experience in Italy: Catholicism and an older culture, a more misogynist and homophobic culture,ā€ she continues. ā€œWe’re looking at them from our individual perspectives, but it keeps coming down to the two of us: how we’re communicating, and how we’re communicating with the audience, because we both use comedy as a great tool that opens the door to potentially difficult things.ā€

Although empty.swimming.pool was still being rehearsed at the time of our conversation, Friedenberg is confident that the end result will connect with audiences in the spirit she and Gribaudi intend: food for thought, but also fodder for laughter. ā€œComedy galvanizes people,ā€ she says. ā€œWe might not all be on the same page politically, but we know we have to galvanize, because a divide-and-conquer thing is happening. Comedy is so potent that way, because we can laugh at ourselves, we can laugh at the situation, and we can laugh together.

ā€œAs a woman, I have to laugh, otherwise I’m just gonna be so pissed off all the time,ā€ she adds, laughing. ā€œI’m not gonna be any fun!ā€

empty.swimmimg.pool runs Feb. 16-18 at Scotiabank Dance Centre. Tickets and info:

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