Dont worry, shell still look like this.
Don't worry, she'll still look like this. Courtesy of the artist

This might be a polarizing performance, Cherdonna Shinatra knows. Tonight she opens her new creation, Clock That Mug or Dusted at Velocity, where last night at a dress rehearsal one advisor told her, "That part is perfect—or it could even be longer," and the other told her, "It's way too long! Cut it!"

She's not cutting it. She's not making it longer. It is the way it is—but it's not necessarily what's expected of the wild-and-crazy drag artist who said, upon winning the Stranger Genius Award in Performance in 2015, "I'm trying to find my way into what feminist performance art is today."

"It's not always going to be bright and cabaret-like," she said by phone this morning. "It might be slower, or quieter. It's a little bit a conversation with the audience for sure."

She's nervous to push her search forward with this departure. Her main materials are her body, the audience, and canvas. Every performance she will start with an entirely clean set and costumes made of canvas, and build up a live-action painting that transforms the environment into something bright and clear. Then she'll scrap that night's creation and start new the next night.

Her inspiration is still the urge to discover what constitutes contemporary feminist performance art.

She uses events in the news, which might find their way into her unfolding "conversation with the audience."

This piece is also curious about what she sees around her: the complexity of people everywhere trying to translate simple desires into political possibilities.

One of her monologues comes from a little kid who posted to YouTube trying to convince her divorcing parents to just get along, just be friends.

For research she looked more deeply into feminist performance art, with help from Velocity head Tonya Lockyer—a terrific trove of information (and a community resource, if you don't know it already).

"I hope people will think, yeah, yes, people should chill out and be nice to each other and treat each other as humans, but also 'Cherdonna is so stupid, I can't believe she's missing the mark, it's so much more complicated," she said. "There's always a back door to the ideas."