The first show in Boca del Lupo’s Micro Performance Series allows you to see dance-theatre artist Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg and friends up close and personal.

True to the series’s name, the Anderson Street Space on Granville Island only allows small audiences in at a time—as it will for Friedenberg’s latest comically warped but achingly true piece, how to be.

“I’m interested that we’re all having this experience together,” Friedenberg tells the Straight over the phone on the way to rehearsal, adding she got familiar with the space while choreographing work for last year’s micro-performances. “Also, you never get to see dance that close, and sometimes being that close we’re really able to experiment with minutiae. It’s a little like you have this big magnifying glass on it.”

Friedenberg’s topic for her first micro-appearance is suitably intimate. How to be refers to our constant fretting about how we “should be” and judging how others “should be”, explains the artist. For Friedenberg, it’s a bit of a departure from the character studies in works like the metal-head ode bAnger and the spiritually searching Porno Death Cult.

Still, there are some similarities in all her work. “I’m kind of obsessed with the human psyche and how weird we all are,” she says with a laugh. “I just started realizing we’re all asking that question all the time: ‘How should I be?’ And it can be debilitating.” The question can be applied to everything from what you should wear to whether you should use antiwrinkle cream and whether you should go to graduate school, she says.

“I just wanted to get in the studio and explore, ‘What does it mean? Is it interesting?’ And once I got in there with this wicked group of people, I thought ‘Yes! This is ludicrous and heartbreaking.’ ” In fact, Friedenberg and her fellow performers—Kate Franklin, Kimberly Stevenson, and Justine A. Chambers—map some pretty personal territory, through comedy, text, and movement.

The work is an excerpt from a full-length piece Friedenberg is developing over the next year or so. Meanwhile, she’s reticent to divulge the secrets she and her cast will reveal in the intimate confines of the Anderson Street Space.

“I like to not give away too much,” she says, but then adds that there will be little that’s hard to relate to in the show, which as usual for Friedenberg’s work defies easy categorization. “I always say, ‘There’s words, and you’ll know what’s going on.’ You might think it’s weird, what’s going on, but you’ll know what’s going on.”

Boca del Lupo presents how to be at the Anderson Street Space on Granville Island from Thursday (February 26) to March 1.