Cherdonna Shinatra | Photo by Greg Newcomb
JODY KUEHNER / CHERDONNA SHINATRA
Metals and Matter of You
APR 15 – 17 + APR 22 – 24 | 7:30 PM
12th Ave Arts Mainstage | 1620 12th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122
Individual Ticket Prices:
Low Income – $25 | General – $40 | Champion – $60
NEW THIS YEAR!
No more surprises at check out! All ticket prices include ticket processing fees. After fees prices are the same as 2026.
Subscribe and save up to $80 per year on ticket costs!
Presented through Velocity’s Regionally Established Creative Incubator Program
Metals and Matter of You, is a new performance work by Jody Kuehner/Cherdonna Shinatra. Cherdonna will act as a death doula in guiding audiences through an exploration of death, decomposition, and consciousness through dance, drag, song, and storytelling. The project is being made in collaboration with Recompose, a queer women-owned Seattle green funeral home that specializes in human composting. Similar to how Recompose facilitates the transformation of the body into soil that generates new life, this project aims to facilitate a transformation in how people conceptualize death from something to be feared to something that can be experienced with care and compassion.
Death and life reveal the wisdom in each of us and in the cycles of nature. And yet in the United States, death has been co-opted by capitalism to extract profits and perpetuate environmental harm. In Metals and Matter of You, Cherdonna will present herself as a fearless leader who can’t help but reveal her own deep-seated anxieties about mortality. Through the performance, Cherdonna will work to flip the script on death, changing the narrative from fear to acceptance and even joy by utilizing humor, queerness, and dance as powerful tools for healing, connection, and self-expression with hope of helping others embrace the beautiful ridiculousness of death as an integral part of life.
ARTISTS
JODY KUEHNER
KATRINA SPADE
MAGGIE L. ROGERS
MARK HAIM
KEYES WILEY
LILIA DEERING
LYNNE ELLIS
ABOUT THE VENUE
12th Avenue Arts is fully accessible for wheelchairs and walkers. The lobby, bathrooms and theater spaces are at street level, and seating is available without the need for an elevator or stairs. Bathrooms will be gender neutral. Seats are 16″ wide with arm rests on either side. Please let us know what we can do to make your dance experience more enjoyable and accessible. Examples of requests below:
- ASL, CART, Assisted Listening Device
- Reserved Ground Floor Seating
- wider chairs
- + more
For requests, please contact Shirley at operations@velocitydancecenter.org or write us a note on our ticketing service when buying tickets. We will do our best to accommodate!
ABOUT THE REGIONALLY ESTABLISHED CREATIVE INCUBATOR
Velocity’s Regionally Established Creative Incubator, Co-Productions, are for Seattle-based artists who want to collaborate with Velocity to share the development, production and presentation of a new full-length work. These artists have experience self-producing their own full-length work, and usually set specific goals for this program that help them grow their long-term artistic mission, vision, and audience, while increasing their work’s technical scale, budget, and impact.
PARTNERS
PROGRAM SPONSORS
Velocity’s Incubator Programs are supported in part by 4Culture’s Cultural Support Services program and the TEW Foundation. Free and reduced cost ticketing supported by 4Culture’s Public Free Access program.
PROJECT SPONSORS
NEFA + NEA
Individual donors: Scott Lynes & Brian Coulthard, Scott Van Gerpen & Britt East, Jason LeBrun & Jason Dixon, Regan Zeebuyth, Steve Ash, Emily Grossman
Photo by Greg Newcomb
JODY KUEHNER
Jody Kuehner (Choreographer/Performer) aka Cherdonna Shinatra (She/Her) uses dance, drag, theater, camp, feminist traditions, absurdity and subversive commentary to make art. Over the last 10 years Jody has created and performed a wide array of evening-length works and performance installations described as “uncategorizable spectacles” (The Stranger) for theaters, museums, clubs, parking lots, and abandoned buildings. Jody has been awarded residencies at UCROSS (Wyoming), Yaddo (New York), Local Theater Company (Boulder, CO), On the Boards (Seattle), and American Dance Festival (Durham, NC). She is a 2023 and 2020 NEFA’s National Dance Project finalist, 2017 Artist Trust Fellowship recipient, 2016 NEFA’s National Dance Project awardee, and 2015 Stranger Genius Award winner. She has been presented locally at On the Boards, Washington Ensemble Theatre, Seattle Theatre Group, and the Henry Art Gallery. She has been presented nationally at the USF in Tampa FL, Go Drag! Festival, Berlin, Germany; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; Centro de las Artes, Monterrey, Mexico; The Yard at Martha’s Vineyard; American Dance Festival, Durham, NC; Sweet Briar College, Sweet Briar, VA; and FringeArts in Philadelphia, PA. Her exhibition DITCH was presented at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; The Momentary at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK; Sarasota Art Museum, FL; and Akron Art Museum, OH. DITCH was featured in ARTnews, i-D Magazine and NBC’s 12 must-see LGBTQ art shows around the world.
Photo coming soon
KATRINA SPADE
Katrina Spade (she/her), Founder and CEO of Recompose, pioneered human composting—a sustainable alternative to conventional burial and cremation that transforms human remains into nutrient‑rich soil. After earning a BA in Anthropology from Haverford College and a Master of Architecture from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she developed the concept of human composting and founded Recompose in 2017. Her work has been instrumental in legalizing human composting in multiple states and reshaping death care with ecological and compassionate practices. Spade has been featured in The Guardian, NPR, Wired, Fast Company, and The New York Times. She is an Echoing Green Fellow, Ashoka Fellow, and Harvard Kennedy School Visiting Social Innovator, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Haverford College in recognition of her transformative contributions to sustainable death care.
Photo coming soon
MAGGIE L. ROGERS
Maggie L. Rogers is a multidisciplinary artist proudly hailing from Louisville, KY. She is a long time collaborator of Cherdonna Shinatra and has worked in many different capacities over the last decade on helping her to create over 10 original works. Favorites include The Doll Pit, Threesome, and Goodnight Cowboy. When she is not making art in a dark room she is a certified professional horticulturist and arborist in training.
Photo coming soon
MARK HAIM
MARK HAIM has been choreographing and teaching for over 25 years. He was Artistic Director of Mark Haim & Dancers from 1984-1987, and the Companhia de Danca de Lisboa from 1987-1990. He has created new works for dance companies such as the Nederlands Dans Theater, Ballet Frankfurt, the Limon Dance Company, the Joffrey II Dancers, and the Rotterdamse Dansgroep, and has restaged his works on The Joffrey Ballet, the Bat-Dor Dance Company of Israel, Djazzex, and the Juilliard Dance Ensemble. His full evening solo project, The Goldberg Variations, has been performed at the American Dance Festival, the Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, The John F. Kennedy Center, On The Boards and other venues in the U.S, Europe, Asia. His newest work, This Land Is Your Land, opened the ArtDanThe Festival in Paris, and has also been performed at the Joyce Theater in NYC and in the Nasher Museum of Art as part of the 2013 ADF performing series. Most recently, Mark choreographed for the Seattle Opera’s productions of The Consul and Tales of Hoffmann. Mark has been on the faculty of the American Dance Festival since 1993 and was the Senior Artist in Residence at the University of Washington Dance Program from 2002-2008. He has also taught at the Reed College, NC School of the Arts, University of Illinois, Ohio University, SMU, VCU, Cornell, JMU, and for schools and companies in Belgium, Holland, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Latvia, Russia, Argentina, Chile and Japan. He is a recipient of a NYFA Choreographers Fellowship, 2 NEA Choreographers Fellowships, and grants from the NPN Suitcase Fund, ArtsLink, Inc. and the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. Mark is a Fulbright Senior Specialist.
Photo coming soon
KEYES WILEY
Keyes Wiley (they/them), also known behind the decks as DJ dark_wiley, is a multi-hyphenated performing artist, DJ, light/sound designer, and educator based in Seattle. Their work spans the worlds of performance, nightlife, and sound, with a practice rooted in collaboration, community, and queer expression. By day, Keyes serves as a dance faculty member at Cornish College of the Arts and is the artistic director of the experimental performance group The NoGoodDoers. By night, as DJ dark_wiley, they are the resident DJ for TUSH—Seattle’s premier destination for drag and queer performance at the Clock-Out Lounge. Known for genre-blending, mood-shifting sets, DJ dark_wiley has played at some of Seattle’s most beloved venues and events, including Bad Idea, Pride in the Park, Peekaboo, White Center Pride, The SAM Remix, Thee Baile, Souletro, Legendary, Pony, Heels at The Cha Cha Lounge, and Dance Floor Feelings at Vermillion. Whether on underground dance floors or main stages, their sets are designed to move bodies and build connection within queer and allied communities. Previously, Keyes served as the Managing Artistic Director of the DIY arts hub Studio Current and was the founder/director of the dance company The New Animals. They’ve collaborated with artists including Keith Hennessy, Keyon Gaskin, Alice Gosti, BenDeLaCreme, Jinkx Monsoon, dani tirrell, and Kitten n Lou, and their performance work has been presented at venues such as On the Boards, Gibney (NYC), Velocity Dance Center, Risk/Reward (PDX), Bumbershoot, and the Seattle International Dance Festival. Keyes also designs original soundscapes for dance, theatre, and fashion—including for Janelle Abbott’s New York Fashion Week collections. A natural-born collaborator, they thrive in spaces that center shared vision, experimentation, and radical joy.
Photo coming soon
LILIA DEERING
Lilia Deering (she/her) is a Seattle-born artist specializing in creating vibrant sculptures and built environments that stimulate the senses and invite interaction. She makes work for a variety of contexts including galleries, stage productions, escape rooms, retail spaces and events. She holds a BFA in Dance from CalArts as well as a Certificate in Museum Studies from UW. Lilia is a member of Washington Ensemble Theater, working as a Scenic, Props, and Immersive Experience Designer and Producer. Her recent design credits with WET include Scenic and Prop Design for Scrambling the Goose II, and Creative Direction for Xquisite Corpse. Lilia has also created props for Drama Tops’ DADS, and Kitten and Lou’s productions of Jingle All The Gay and Put A Spell On You, among others. Lilia has been featured for her Visual Arts practice in Public Display Art Magazine and in a full page article in the Seattle Times for her immersive installation project, STÖR, created in collaboration with Mary Anne Carter. Her art has been featured locally at such venues as ARTS at King Street Station, The Museum of Museums, Frye Museum Store, Base Camp 1&2, Slip Gallery, and more. Lilia creates art and merchandise under the alias, Welcome Gnome, and frequently hosts open studios as part of the Pioneer Square Art Walk. IG @welcomegnome
Photo coming soon
LYNNE ELLIS
Lynne Ellis (they/she) shares two decades of creative effort with Seattle’s artistic and literary communities. Their previous designs include Manifesto, Doin it Right, desert/DESERT, déjalo, and Ñ (all with ILVS STRAUSS) and many shows in local warehouse and subterranean spaces. Ellis’s design and electrician work appeared on stage at On The Boards, PICA, Velocity Dance Center, ACT Theatre, Seattle Rep, and other beloved performing arts organizations. An award-winning poet, Ellis is a writer-member of Common Area Maintenance and publishing editor of Tulipwood Books. She wants to work with you.