Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak
“If the body of a dancer is not the thing perceived in a dance performance, then what is? You’ll have to attend a Mad Shak show to experience it. It is unnamed, and comprised of the circulation of energy and the power of attention. Some of the bravest experimental performers attempt to conjure it, but few summon it in performance space as successfully as Shanahan and Mad Shak.”
Sharon Hoyer, New City Chicago
Mission and Brief History
Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak (MS/MS) is a Chicago-based contemporary dance company founded in 1994 by choreographer and movement educator Molly Shanahan, PhD. We are dedicated to transformative performance and movement research that centers innovative vocabularies, creative risk, body equity on stage, and deep research into the observer/observed relationship. Our work blends rigorous choreographic exploration with somatic and creative practices that challenge dominant aesthetics that have long upheld narrow ideals of virtuosity and beauty while excluding many bodies.
We are a trauma-aware organization that views embodiment not just as artistic expression, but as a site of agency, repair, and power. Many in our community are neurodivergent. Through our founder, ensemble artists, and broader community, MS/MS is by, for, and about women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people with disabilities.
We create evening-length performances and pedagogical experiences that support personal and collective transformation for professional and emerging artists, adult students, and audiences.
For over thirty years, MS/MS has been recognized for a movement language and creative process that is deeply human, rigorously researched, and unafraid to challenge entrenched hierarchies around the body in dance and beyond.
One newly-defined aspect of MS/MS is Spiral Body Techniques® (SBT), a movement method and teacher certification developed by Shanahan through decades of research, performance, and trauma-aware teaching. SBT affirms the intelligence of the body in all bodies, creating space for dancers and non-dancers to move with agency, expressive power, and care for self and others. MS/MS believes that excellence in performance is inseparable from healing, liberation, and innovation, qualities that emerge when dancers are trusted as cultural thinkers and creators, and when pedagogy is reframed as relational and emergent rather than prescriptive or obedience-based.
Our current focus is honing our artist-led structure to support long-term resilience and access to our work, while facing the age-old challenge of paying artists, including our artistic director; supporting the creation and presentation of work; and proactive legacy planning. These efforts sometimes collide with expectations that arts organizations conform to externally determined “best practices,” which can obscure the realities and interactivity of cost, labor, and values that make meaningful work possible. Simply put, people and organizations change, infinitely resist becoming a “brand,” and rarely does creative excellence conform to repeatable structures. MS/MS prioritizes creative process and those nuanced approaches to organizational growth, broadly defined, that cultivate temporary communities, foster collaboration, nurture experimentation into seeing and being seen through the performance of movement in relationship, and allow for cycles of production and restoration.
MS/MS has been honored by stellar critical response, receives funding from a handful of (primarily) Chicago-based organizations, individual and board donors, and has a long history of "punching above our weight" in self-produced contexts.
Our thirty-plus years of continuous contribution to Chicago’s dance ecology has earned us grace: to define, at least in part, what best practices mean for MS/MS. That includes focusing administrative roles within a lean, low- overhead model; deepening our commitment to BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ artists, our artists and community living with disabilities or neurodivergence, and those recovering from the damage of dance norms that fetishize youthful, “idealized” bodies.
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“For years, Molly Shanahan, independently and through her company Mad Shak, has meticulously examined the alchemy that occurs between performer and audience. Not just what happens to the performer on stage—the gaze of an audience cloaked in darkness is a fearsome, intoxicating force any performing artist can attest to—but what happens to the observer through the act of watching, and the energetic space between all involved.”
“Both patient and adventurous, Molly Shanahan likes to go deep, sometimes examining one issue in multiple works over as many as seven years. The payoff is a unique, gutsy contemplation of performance, its philosophy and practice, expressed in precise, subtle, even paradoxical moments.”
“...a unique, gutsy contemplation of performance, its philosophy and practice, expressed in precise, subtle, even paradoxical moments.”
“...a singular voice in Chicago dance...”
“Through years of this work Shanahan and her longtime collaborators Kristina Fluty and Jeff Hancock vibrate on the same plane; it’s like they stepped through the same wormhole into a dimension with additional modes of non-verbal communication...the sensitivity and subtlety of Shanahan, Fluty and Hancock is of a quality that can be cultivated only over decades. ”
