With the nerdy, crime-obsessed kid in Goggles, solo performer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg may have dug out her creepiest character yet

To hear her talk about it, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg has an entire population of bizarre characters living inside her, just waiting to come out. And each time she creates a new solo, she has to reach in deep to find him or her.

That’s meant channelling everyone from her inner metalhead for bANGER: The Power Hour to a sleazy talk-show host in Nick & Juanita: Livin’ in My Dreams. But for the dance-theatre artist’s new Goggles, which premieres next Tuesday (November 17) to November 21 at the Cultch’s Historic Theatre, she may have dug up her creepiest persona yet.

“The voice that was kind of coming out was this 8- or 9-year-old boy who was obsessed with crime drama. He deals with everything through the template of a crime scene and empowers himself as an imaginary detective who solves the case,” says the animated Friedenberg, laughing at how weird it probably sounds.

Taking a break on a lobby sofa in the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre, she goes on to describe the bizarre getup she dons for the role: “I really like swimming but I’ve always looked ridiculous in goggles—I don’t know why. The character’s real name is Norman but we kept calling him Goggles—goggles are what he wears, but also the way he sees the world.…And then there’s my yellow suit: it looks a bit like a Hazmat suit but also a kid’s sweat suit. And because of its colour, it looks like crime tape.”

Like the other characters she’s developed over the years, this one grew out of about six months of improvisations. Friedenberg was inspired by her own addiction to, and the huge popularity of, TV crime shows like CSI: Miami. “I watch them and say, ‘This is junk. But is there another one on?’…Why do so many intelligent people I know like these shows? Is it that revealing of the dark side or chaos and the return to order? And of course it’s not like that in real life.”

Working from those ideas, she and her long-time collaborator, director Sophie Yendole, started to develop a character at the Banff Centre in February of last year. “We realized that when I was talking about these shows, I would always be hunched over—I was sort of doing ‘this little kid voice’,” she says, lapsing into Norman’s nerdy speech, sounding something like a cross between Milhouse Van Houten and Marvin the Martian. Friedenberg, who works through movement, brought in the body language of everyone from CSI: Miami’s David Caruso (“the guy can’t keep his head straight”) to her own little brother. And she spoke to children to study the ways they talked and moved, ending up tapping some of the raw, unfettered emotions she felt as a kid—“that anger and frustration, and the hyperness of not being able to settle down”.

Trained in ballet, contemporary dance, and theatre, the artistic director of Tara Cheyenne Performance has never been preoccupied with the boundaries of dance and theatre. In the jet-black comedy, Norman is a boy dealing with his dad’s new girlfriend and a baby sitter who has her own issues. To Friedenberg and Yendole’s surprise, the story morphed into a murder mystery.

Throughout, they had a Vancouver Police Department detective working as a consultant and helping them sort not only through the technical aspects of a crime scene, but through solving the mystery. Adding to the eerie atmosphere are the haunting soundscape by her husband, musician-composer Marc Stewart, and ominous lighting by James Proudfoot.

“It’s a tragedy, but it’s also quite funny and quite uncomfortable,” Friedenberg says enthusiastically. “People can be prepared to laugh and to be a little bit perplexed at the mystery unfolding.

“There’s some sadness and some fear,” she adds, noting it’s been extremely difficult for her to continue returning to work on some of the darker places in Goggles—especially when the child is frightened.

As long a process as it is for Friedenberg to find her characters, it’s even harder for her to shake them once she’s started performing them. After all, she has to live in their shoes for a while: bANGER has travelled from London’s Southbank Centre to Saint John, and Friedenberg has just arrived back from a three-week B.C. tour of the solo show. Each time she comes home, she says, her husband notices she’s walking with a lope like the metalhead Ivan.

After nine years of inhabiting these different characters, doesn’t she ever suffer an identity crisis? “It becomes second nature. I feel like I’m a blank canvas, and sometimes I think, ‘Am I as a person really boring?’ Because the characters are so bright when you go into them,” she explains. Then, tellingly, she goes on to refer to herself in the plural: “It’s a great job—I get to exercise all these different parts of my selves.”