This is the sign you see as you walk into Clock that Mug or Dusted at Velocity.
But there's an outfit in it by Danial Hellman that will blow your mind. This sign, which you see as you walk into Clock that Mug or Dusted, hints at its amazingness. Christopher Frizzelle

Cherdonna's new show, Clock that Mug or Dusted, which opened last weekend and plays through this weekend, is an hour long, with a glorious, hilarious first half, and a tedious, messy second half. The second half was so excruciating it blocked out my memory of the first half. Frustrated, I grumbled to someone as I was leaving, "Why was that so boring?" and overheard someone else saying, "I felt like I was in 1965."

I had been warned. "I'm trying to find my way into what feminist performance art is today," Jody Kuehner, who embodies Cherdonna, told Jen Graves last week on Slog. "It might be slower, or quieter. It's a little bit a conversation with the audience for sure."

I almost didn't want to write anything, but I've praised her so much—see here and here and here—that I feel like I have to say something.

The easiest way to say it is, if this were the first Cherdonna show I'd ever seen, I probably wouldn't be interested in going to more Cherdonna shows.

So much of what makes Cherdonna interesting (to me) isn't here. There's no dancing. There's no lip-synching. There's very little music—very little in the way of sound at all. There are lots of paints and balloons and candies and things she can make a mess with, and without giving too much away, that's essentially what we see: Someone muttering and making a giant mess. It was as exciting as watching a kid play with trucks, or ingredients found in kitchen cabinets, or invisible friends.

And the letdown felt physical, like a sensory turning point, because the first twenty minutes of the show was packed with inventiveness, including the way she entered, the way she revealed what she was wearing, and the dress by Danial Hellman itself. It's a knock out. It's not what she's wearing in publicity images. It's... well, here's how Kuehner described it in an email before I saw the show:

My costume will be a Dolly Parton rip off of a bellbottom and bell-sleeved jumpsuit with a cut out so I have one breast exposed and one butt cheek exposed. Because I'm annoyed that men can show their nipples and woman can't among other references to the body in the history of performance art.

It is entirely possible that if I were more educated on the history of feminist performance art in the '60s and '70s, I would have had a richer response to this work. Instead, my patience was fried and I left feeling frustrated. That said, there's a bit about peanut butter and banana sandwiches that will stay with me, along with a moment in the show when she's digging around for props under the area where the audience sits, and her digging around is lit up, projecting out onto the stage and casting shadows on the back wall of the set—shadows with strangenesses worthy of Plato's cave.