Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg and Silvia Gribaudi juggle art forms and laughs with Chutzpah

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      Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg and Silvia Gribaudi may live continents apart, but in one way they inhabit the same territory: a no man’s land between theatre and dance.

      They also share a gift for physical comedy and a taste for the wonderfully absurd. Friedenberg, here in Vancouver, has created everything from a warped ode to a metalhead (bAnger) to a comically macabre take on Victorian funeral rites (Highgate). In Italy, Gribaudi has conjured ironic solos about the female condition, and tongue-in-cheek works for aging dancers.

      “People are always asking us, ‘Is it dance? Is it theatre? Is it performance art?’ And of course, it doesn’t matter to us,” says Friedenberg with a laugh, sitting with her fellow artist in a rehearsal studio at the Scotiabank Dance Centre. “If those questions didn’t come up, that would be a good thing.”

      For Friedenberg, character work and spoken text have always mashed up easily with movement. And that disregard for artistic boundaries is just one of the factors that drew the pair together for the new show empty.swimming.pool, their transatlantic collaboration.

      Friedenberg says she knew immediately the two would hit it off when she saw Gribaudi’s quirky signature one-woman work, A Corpo Libero, at Dance Base in Edinburgh back in 2013. “I almost peed my pants laughing when I saw it,” she says. “So I went to her after the show. It was about the female body, and I appreciated the raw human aspect of her comedy—because I feel like that’s what I’m interested in.”

      They really started to click when Friedenberg first invited Gribaudi here to B.C. to do research together. Whenever Gribaudi’s English failed, Friedenberg would attempt to speak Italian, but fall into the Spanish she knows. It led to many laughs, and also to some fruitful ideas about communicating.

      “The show has become about identity, where it’s interesting to see these human beings on-stage push themselves to communicate,” Gribaudi says of a work that includes a lot of play with gestures and spoken bits in both the women’s languages. “That’s remained the spine of the piece, the theme,” agrees Friedenberg. “She does this whole part in Italian. I did this whole thing in English in Italy, when we performed it. And you realize it’s beyond language.”

      Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg and Silvia Gribaudi.
      Wendy D

      Both women also play around with personas in the piece. Friedenberg is known for losing herself in out-there, riotously detailed characters, but it seems that Gribaudi has pushed her to play with shifts between herself and her stage persona in empty.swimming.pool.

      “How do we play with our own presence?” Gribaudi asks with a wry smile. “We often put on this mask of another. So here we play around with the character and the human being—maybe to create some confusion. What is real and what is not real?”

      “It’s a new place of vulnerability for me,” admits Friedenberg. “We challenge each other in different ways.”

      For a sign of how much the women have connected over their weeks of rehearsal, and how much they share a somewhat twisted sense of humour, look no further than the title of the piece. It was a joke Gribaudi made when she walked into the grey, high-ceilinged studio for the first time: “It looks like an empty swimming pool.” The moniker stuck.

      “We liked the idea of potential in an empty swimming pool,” Friedenberg says. “There’s an excitement of ‘What are you going to fill it up with?’ But there’s also a danger—in a poetic and darkly funny way.”

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