Feature Friday - Natasha Fagant
Self Portrait by Natasha Fagant
Name
Natasha Fagant
Pronouns
She/They
Bio
Natasha Perry-Fagant is an award nominated actor, writer, director for screen and stage with directing credits on critically acclaimed pieces “A David Lynch Wet Dream” , “SCRUM” ,“The Vanity" and in Teesri Duniya’s Production of “White Lion Brown Tiger”.
Hailing from the small town of Summerland BC, Perry-Fagant was active in the small theatre community. She would eventually make the trek cross country to the bohemian and art filled Montreal. In 2013 she received her BFA in Theatre Performance from Concordia University graduating with honors. Through her degree she fell in love with all forms of physical theatre and focused much of her studies to learning traditional codified theatre styles such as Commedia Dell'Arte, the theatre of the passions and traditional Beijing Opera. The latter being a major inspiration for much of her burlesque work.
She can be caught at Cabaret and burlesque shows around the city as her alter ego "Miss Pretty Pretentious - the queen of uncomfortable arousal". Her burlesque work straddles the line between the fluffy cheesecake erotica associated with burlesque, and the visceral grit of sobering performance art.
When not on stage Perry-Fagant can be caught as a ghost storyteller in the streets. Since 2016 she has been a part of Guidatour’s Fantomes Montreal team recounting the salacious, macabre and bloody history of Ville-Marie. To date she has been working as a street storyteller as her character the prudish Victorian Miss Edith.
Fagant's most recent project is an evolving interdisciplinary show called “Mama I wanna be a computer”; a show that aims to explore the way our relationship with technology has affected our relationship with our bodies.
Instagram
@bbaroness
Where in Montreal are you located?
Mile End
What do you love about that neighborhood?
There are so many performance spaces! Equally the neighborhood has a vibrant blend of fresh new cafes and bars while also being home to long rooted Portuguese and Hasidic communities that ground the area.
What’s your favourite art space in Montreal and why?
So my answer on this one is definitely a bit more sentimental than practical, its Eva-B on St-Laurent. Eva - B is one of the spaces that aways gives me inspiration. Its a spot that hosts live events, displays art and allows me to indulge in my favorite activity: Thrifting! Although I've never had any of my work performed at Eva B, its where many seeds were planted and developed. The Cafe/venue/thrift shop has always felt like a treehouse with numerous rooms and cozy activities to foster anything I'm work on or through.
What do you do on stage? Tell us about your work!
This Friday the 17th I am hosting at Cafe Cleopatra's upstairs stage for "God Forbid!" a burlesque variety show produced by the Candyass Cabaret.
I love hosting Cabaret shows because it allows me to indulge into cartoon like characters to pull the show together. For this show I am working on bringing to the stage a humorous Appalachian Preacher who wants to proclaim the good word but gets a little side tracked by the "heavenly bodies" onstage.
When not performing as my burlesque ego "Miss Pretty Pretentious", I aim to bring a grounded truth and humanity to the stage. In my personal life I hate suffering and often go out of my way to acknowledge it. I have been lucky to have had the chance to play numerous characters witness to pain or complicit in creating suffering for others, which has been a very rewarding challenge as an actor. I am thinking particularly to Tiffany in Teesri Duniya's Production of "White Lion Brown Tiger", a character who was trying to quell a cultural argument but only added to the fire with her own ignorance.
Describe your art in your own words.
I think in all my work I wind up to playing with dichotomies. Miss Pretty Pretentious is "the queen of uncomfortable arousal" , she wants to give you a hard on by spitting black ink on her tits, but she wants to make you confused as to what you find exciting.
With performance art and film projects I often try to break the fourth wall or quickly depart from convention to keep the audience on their toes. We might start with a fluffy musical theatre song complete with backing track and choreography, but that breaks off into a stream of consciousness monologue about how to get through the task of getting through picking up medication while having a panic attack.
What have you been working on recently?
I have a couple things on the go. I've been branching out and making solo erotic horror films. The first edition is "Kihúzva" where a woman finds a wire protruding from her breast while grooming and tries to find out what is on the other end of it. The short was available for a short time on OF but was taken down due to its gory content. I have still yet to find a home for my niche content of naked bloody art.
For the stage I have been slowly developing my next solo show "Mama I wanna be a computer". Its been percolating in my head for a couple of years now and I was lucky enough to work and perform an excerpt last year for the "Shruti" artist showcase. The scene involved recounting a bulimic episode while I swallowed three dimes attached to dental floss. After describing the purge I sang a song and concluded the piece by pulling the dimes out of my stomach. The idea of eating costs or flushing money down the drain being the image with a direct connection to the visceral and tangible nature of eating disorders. I am for the rest of the piece to be similar vignettes touching on productivity culture, mommy issues and the desire to connect in a world filled with platitudes.
What drew you to the stage?
There is something magical that happens when a group of people enter a performance space and endow the stage with with their energy. For all the stories and turmoil we may be living in the moment, we decide to place our attention to one platform and whatever transpires upon it. The feeling of being onstage, doing something meaningful and feeling that the audience is there with you, for me, that's what feeds my desire to live and create.
Who are some of your favourite stage performers?
The one, the only, the diva: Edith Piaf. My love of contradictions in performance probably started with Edith Piaf. She was a powerful vocalist who could sing technically perfect but her desire to live and interpret the song would have her cry and falter adding to the drama of the story. "L'Accordéoniste" remains my favorite of her ballads.
Tell us about your BEST or WORST performance.
It was during the Regina Fringe Festival and they had decided to switch technicians in the middle of the run. I was performing "A David Lynch Wet Dream" and EVERYTHING was going wrong! Sound and projection cues were triggered back to back which had us skip various sequences and after a dramatic moment I was onstage waiting for the next sound cue... but the technician was lost. In as dramatic and grounded a voice as possible I yelled out the cue "VFX Seven Tantrum" but still nothing happened. I had to jump off stage, naked and covered in ink (basically my calling card now), run back to the tech booth and fire up the next cue.
Luckily since it was a surrealist show based in a Lynchian landscape it didn't totally ruin the show.
What’s your favorite Montreal stage and why?
La Chapelle. I've only gotten the chance to perform in the space during the fringe festival but its a stage that has the spirit of, dance, theatre , clown and weird performance art just soaked into the stage.
