A Tara Cheyenne Performance production. At the Cultch on Wednesday, May 1. Continues until May 4

Highgate’s trip into the afterlife is so brilliantly twisted, you might not want to return to the land of the living again.

Named for London’s Victorian graveyard, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg’s dance with death is definitely creepy. But from its flickering chandeliers to its echoing church bells, it’s also full of innovative choreography, warped humour, and haunting images. Picture a backlit Friedenberg in black mourning garb, with three bodies crawling behind her, under her ridiculously extended skirt. Or Justine Chambers’s little ghost boy, lurking shyly in the corner, ringing a death knell.

The solo artist best known for works like bANGER and Goggles has outdone herself with this ambitious five-person dance-theatre spectacle. Her company Tara Cheyenne Performance goes all-out here, in a mix that bears the audacious marks of her mentor and former director of the project, the late British dance-theatre renegade Nigel Charnock. Friedenberg and Co. have even gone so far as to decorate the Cultch lobby in eerie Victorian style and deck out the front-of-house staff in Old-World mourning gear.

The pretence is that Friedenberg’s oddball cast of characters has arrived to guide us into death; we are visitors to our own funerals, as it were. But the show’s brilliance is that it is neither literal nor entirely narrative; Friedenberg finds a new stage language that plays with, and parodies, Victorian society’s obsessive funerary rites and lengthy mourning periods—as well as our own era’s denial of the inevitable.

On one hand, we have her playing the role of two strange hosts for the evening. Addressing us directly are Mr. Stone, a cynical and slightly letchy undertaker, and Mrs. Graves, who gets excited about anything morbid. “Consumption: it’s sooo fashionable these days!” she exclaims, runway-walking across the stage. Graves is the stronger character, a stiff-upper-lipped mistress of ceremonies who alternately fawns over Chambers’s boy and barks at him. (“No touchies!” she screeches as his hand wanders over his crotch.) She also has some killer dance sequences, whether waving her skirts around and kicking her legs high in the second act’s heavy-metal/goth number, or engaging in a chilling pas de deux with her ghost-child.

But Highgate’s most ingenious element is its corpse-pale “triplet” widows—top-notch dancer-actors Alison Denham, Susan Elliott, and Bevin Poole as Victorian widows joined at their voluminous skirts. The gimmick allows for endless play: sometimes the veiled women latch hands and bend forward and backward to the sounds of clock-tower bells; later, one faints and the others are trapped and struggle to flee. They cackle, they scream, they sob, as they lurch in their skirts—it’s a three-headed marvel of movement, thanks in large part to the lush, clever design by costume artist Alice Mansell (who also happens to be Friedenberg’s mother).

The show’s ominous atmosphere is heightened by composer Marc Stewart’s rich soundscape of bells, organs, and crow caws, as well as James Proudfoot’s dramatic lighting.

Highgate loses a bit of its momentum because it’s broken up by an intermission, but that is a tiny quibble.

The show’s mix of history, mortality, and hilarity is something you’ve never experienced before—but you should really dare to. Right before the performance started on opening night, Cultch executive director Heather Redfern suggested the production, in show-biz terms, “has legs” to travel long and far. She’s definitely right about that—those legs just happen to be deathly pale and icily cold.