Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg is gingerly stepping around three bodies lying lifeless on the floor in one huge, black Victorian skirt. She’s furtively yanking off earrings and pulling at a ring. “She wanted me to have it,” she assures, not so convincingly, in her over-the-top British accent.

Welcome to the absurd and sometimes ghoulishly macabre world of Highgate, the Vancouver dance-theatre artist’s twisted take on Victorian funerary culture—a culture that often fetishized death to outrageous extremes. Friedenberg’s company, Tara Cheyenne Performance, is rehearsing its most ambitious show to date at the Firehall Arts Centre before the show finally premieres at the Cultch. The format is new to Friedenberg: best known as a solo performer playing a heavy-metal dude in bAnger and a creepy, crime-obsessed kid in Goggles, she has created this piece for five artists on-stage. But Highgate delves into the same blackly comic terrain that Friedenberg specializes in.

“There’s an edge where you can go dark, but you always need a little lifeline to the funny,” the incongruously upbeat artist says after rehearsal, animatedly letting out an invisible rope above her. “But I like to dance around that line!

“I really enjoy and find it satisfying in a difficult and a kind of delicious way to deal with the hardest things in life,” she continues, then says of the work’s theme of death: “The importance of existence becomes so palpable when you deal with the thing we all have to deal with. It’s the vulnerability of us all, and the fragility.”

The premiere of Highgate is the culmination of a tumultuous few years for the performer, ones marked by birth and death and all the forces of life that so infuse her warped new piece. The work had its beginnings back in 2008, when she became obsessed with London’s Highgate Cemetery, taking a guided tour of the spooky Victorian landmark while in town to perform bAnger. There was an instant connection.

“It was just amazing: overgrown, gothic, with these huge tombs,” she relates. “The guide was talking about how much money went into their tombs and mausoleums. People were going broke on a regular basis to pay for their funerals.” The artist found out Queen Victoria had brought the trend to its zenith with her elaborate, extended mourning for Prince Albert, and that funerary businesses took over London’s main shopping streets. “So I just got seduced,” she sums up.

Friedenberg came back with a clear first vision for a new work: the three women she refers to as the triplets (to be played by dancers Susan Elliott, Alison Denham, and Bevin Poole). In her research into the subject, she found out Victorian society had set out three very strict stages of mourning for widows: in the first, yearlong stage, they had to cover themselves in drab, nonshiny black; in the second, slightly shorter phase, they could lift their veil and wear some fabric trim; and in the third, they could start to wear jewellery and a bit of colour again.

So the trio embodied those three dictates, helped by the voluminous, conjoined black skirts fashioned by her mother, artist Alice Mansell (who has designed costumes for the show as well as, Friedenberg reveals, an immersive, Victorian-eerie installation in the lobby at the Cultch). “They’re joined in grief and joined in their mourning,” Friedenberg explains, referring to the dancers who shuffle and waltz around in their gown to truly surreal, yet funny, effect. Of the dancers playing her three widows, she adds: “I can read them really well, and they can read me. We had all this time to improvise so we could go into these horrible dark places and hilarious places together.”

From there, Friedenberg started creating two wonderfully weird characters for herself: Mrs. Graves, a sort of mistress of ceremonies who seems to take morbid delight in all the funerals going on, and Mr. Stone, an undertaker who’s not above taking advantage of his clients. As for accomplished local dancer Justine Chambers, who in rehearsal skulks around the bodies and rings an ominous bell, Friedenberg affectionately calls her “the creepy little boy”. “He’s just kind of like the little ghost in the corner, the shadow of death that’s always there,” she explains.

While all of this was happening, Friedenberg was immersing herself in research about Victorian death rites (she highly recommends Catharine Arnold’s book Necropolis: London and Its Dead) and making more trips to Highgate Cemetery. Along the way, she also started working with Nigel Charnock, the English dance and physical-theatre maverick whose solos’ bent humour spoke to Friedenberg’s own unique, hard-to-categorize style. He came to Vancouver for a workshop with Tara Cheyenne Performance in 2011 and later even agreed to direct Highgate. Then, in the summer of 2012, Friedenberg suddenly received an email from Charnock’s partner saying he had terminal cancer. Within weeks, the 52-year-old was dead—his passing rocking the international arts world.

“This thing is about death and my director dies,” Friedenberg marvels. “Nigel had such a twisted sense of humour, and I just thought, ‘Fuck, man, that’s just ridiculous.’ So I was frozen for a few months.” Over this time, Friedenberg and her partner (and Highgate score composer) Marc Stewart had also had a baby. “It was this birth and the death—having this little blond baby and losing this person who I was like, ‘Finally I found you!’ ”

By last fall, though, Friedenberg was back in the studio and hooked up with director-dramaturge Anita Rochon to complete Highgate.

Yes, it’s been a long and often dark journey into old-time funerary obsessions, but on some level, Friedenberg has come to realize that era’s attitudes to death may have been healthier for being more open. “You would have the body in your house for three days and make sure they didn’t wake up,” she comments. “We put people away into nursing homes and hospices. It’s like being protected from something we can’t be protected from.”

But has dwelling on the theme of death, and all those gruesome rituals, made for a sometimes depressing process for Friedenberg? She smiles and says no before heading out into the afternoon with her baby. “It sounds corny, but it makes me really appreciate everybody around me and my own health and my little guy,” she says, and then adds with her characteristic edge: “At the same time I’m like, ‘Everything is so ludicrous. Life is wild and hilarious.’ I almost feel like dealing with it has made me more joyful in a way.”