Performance Art

April Hava Shenkman is an avant-garde performance artist, surrealist comedienne, and experimental theater-maker. Her work blends elements of classic Vaudeville, the Golden Age of Hollywood, European physical theater, and raw American performance art into a highly stylized genre of its own. Critics and profiles frequently describe her performances as feeling like "The Judy Garland Show directed by Federico Fellini" due to her ability to fuse vintage theatrical glamour with absurd, dreamlike chaos.

Core Elements of Her Work

Vocal Gymnastics & Absurdist Comedy: Shenkman uses her voice as a primary experimental instrument. Her live acts heavily feature rapid speed-talking, spontaneous operatic impromptus, structured gibberish, and exaggerated Old Hollywood star impersonations. She bends traditional stand-up comedy into theater, interweaving actual jokes with surreal monologues.
Physical Theater & Clowning: Heavily influenced by European clowning and theater traditions, her performances rely on expressive physical movement, elaborate vintage costumes, and high-energy stage presence. Her background includes training and performing with the legendary Los Angeles performance art maverick Rachel Rosenthal & Company.
Multimedia & Collaboration: Her performance art often crosses over into puppet theater and filmmaking. She frequently collaborates with the iconic Bob Baker Marionette Theater in Los Angeles for large-scale, Vaudeville-inspired multimedia family shows like The Gatz Benny Show.

Ultimately, she is an artist who subverts classical entertainment structures to create surreal, deeply human, and highly unpredictable solo and ensemble theater experiences.

While April Hava Shenkman is rarely categorized as a strict, historical Dada re-enactor, her connection to Dadaism is deeply rooted in her artistic philosophy, lineage, and structural approach to performance art.

Her work actively embodies the core principles of the early 20th-century anti-art movement through several distinct connections:

The Lineage of Avant-Garde Performance

Shenkman’s most direct connection to Dada is through her extensive training and performance history with the late Rachel Rosenthal, a pioneer of Los Angeles performance art. Rosenthal’s experimental, improvisational theater style directly inherited the avant-garde traditions of the early mid-century European art scenes—most notably Dada and Surrealism. Through this artistic lineage, Shenkman adopted the practice of using the live stage not just for traditional storytelling, but as a site for raw, unpredictable artistic experimentation.

Radical Use of Sound Poetry and "Gibberish"

One of the historical hallmarks of Dada performance (pioneered by figures like Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire) was sound poetry—deconstructing language into abstract, phonetic noises to mock societal logic. Shenkman utilizes a modern iteration of this technique in her live acts. She is highly regarded for her "vocal gymnastics" and structured gibberish, weaponizing nonsensical speech and hyper-speed talking to subvert traditional theatrical dialogue and create a sense of manic, dadaist absurdity.

Subverting Form: "Anti-Comedy"

Dadaism was fundamentally an "anti-art" movement intended to challenge and parody what the establishment considered "good art". Shenkman applies this exact philosophy to the realm of comedy, often operating in a space described as anti-comedy or absurdist theater. By blending standard stand-up structures with operatic impromptus, puppets, and surreal situations, she rejects standard commercial comedy formulas in favor of a chaotic, dreamlike performance art environment.

Living Inside the Art (The Over-the-Top Scale)

Dadaists frequently pushed the boundaries of how art physically interacted with the audience. Shenkman echoed this interactive absurdity in a notable solo installation where she built a 16-foot tall giant sculpture of herself and performed live inside of it, literalizing the Dadaist concept of breaking the boundary between the artist, the artwork, and the spectator.

In a fast-paced digital world dominated by algorithmic, mass-produced content, April Hava Shenkman’s work serves as a necessary, deeply human counterweight. Her art is important because it aggressively protects the vulnerability, unpredictability, and community-centric nature of live, avant-garde performance.

Her unique approach meets several critical cultural and emotional needs:

1. Combating Creative Homogeneity with Raw Vulnerability

Modern entertainment often relies on sanitized, predictable formulas designed for quick online consumption. Shenkman challenges this by intentionally introducing chaotic dadaist absurdity, live "vocal gymnastics," and experimental clowning. Her performances embrace real-time risk, imperfection, and deep emotional vulnerability. As she describes it, her goal is to "share the innermost depths of my existence through the art of comedy," creating an unfiltered space where audiences can "laugh & cry, without even knowing why."

2. De-stigmatizing Motherhood in the Arts

In many artistic sectors, transitioning into parenthood is still viewed as a career-pausing event, or something to be kept separate from "serious" avant-garde work. Shenkman directly subverts this by making her motherhood the absolute center of her art. In works like The Marvelous Mrs. Shenkman (filmed live while heavily pregnant) and The Gatz Benny Show (which stars her son), she brings the visceral reality, physical transformations, and psychological shifts of motherhood directly into the surrealist comedy space. She normalizes the idea that an avant-garde artist can be fully maternal and fully experimental simultaneously.

3. Preserving the History of Los Angeles Live Performance

As an alumna and former performer of Rachel Rosenthal & Company, Shenkman acts as a living bridge keeping the rich, physical lineage of historic Los Angeles performance art alive. Her frequent multimedia collaborations with the historic Bob Baker Marionette Theater ensure that vintage, handcrafted Vaudeville traditions remain active, accessible, and vibrant for modern, multigenerational audiences.

4. Healing Through Pure Joy

Underneath the high-concept theater and surreal masks, her underlying artistic mission is radically positive. For projects like The Happy Happy Show, her stated goal was simply "making the world happy again, one smile at a time." In a world frequently burdened by heavy socio-political exhaustion, her work treats joyful absurdity not as a distraction, but as an essential tool for human connection and emotional