In the opening solo (it’s a one-woman show, so everything is solo) Friedenberg moves, head bowed, hair a closed curtain around her face in a state of slow, presumably religious, ecstasy, meandering downstage to the sounds of feet on gravel (no doubt the sound of pilgrimage). Not that this reading is necessarily correct, I am not particularly interested in asserting what’s “not dance” and “not theatre.” That said, I understood Porno Death Cult as a dance work – Friedenberg’s incredible physicality and the committed integration of the body into all aspects of the piece led me to read it intuitively as dance. In some circles “theatre” remains a dirty word (I think this is a hangover from 1980s performance self-identifying as “not theatre”), but TCP takes it on, melding synergistically and seamlessly with dance. In an age when research-oriented, formalist movement experimentation is de rigueur in contemporary dance, TCP’s commitment to cross-disciplinary, character-driven performance via narrative and persona is refreshing.
Porno Death Cult is Tara Cheyenne Performance’s (TCP) (Friedenberg’s eponymous company) fifth full-length work. Each shaft of light on an unwitting audience member was an awkward public annunciation (you know, the Renaissance painting scene where the Virgin Mary is impregnated by a beam of light) ushering in an extended, multi-sensory investigation into the absurdity and intricacies at the intersection of faith and the body.
After a slightly saturated week or so of dance events and despite Friedenberg’s notoriety, I was totally uninitiated and a bit unprepared for the next sixty minutes. I wasn’t sure what, quite yet, but the involuntary, visceral fear of unsolicited audience participation had my attention. When a spotlight shone down on the audience, illuminating an unsuspecting woman sitting in front of me, I knew Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg’s Porno Death Cult was on to something. Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg / Photo by Wendy D.
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