Select Press Response
Ex/Body: de/fame, de/position, de/liberate (2025)
From the Humane Laboratory: Mad Shak Presents the Third and Final Chapter of “Ex/Body”
“This piece is being made in the midst of deep questions with the ensemble about where do we go from here? What do we do with the coexistence of these feelings of the desire to be seen? The desire to hide?"
“My work is asking the performers to feel something very intrinsic in the experience of being seen while dancing,” says Molly Shanahan, founder and artistic director of Mad Shak. “It means permitting oneself to crumble into one’s vulnerability and then find the expertise of that experience that allows it to be generous, and an offering for an observer to disarm. Even for a moment.”
This concentrated, unflagging curiosity about vulnerability in both performers and their audiences is a hallmark of Shanahan’s choreography and movement language, one she has developed over decades. Her approach is so distinctive that it now bears a registered trademark. Shanahan teaches her Spiral Body Techniques here and has certified teachers who bring the form—grounded in muscular release and energetic fluidity—to dancers outside Chicago. This includes Detroit-based dancers Jaicee Partridge and Maria DiMarzio, who appeared in the most recent Mad Shak performance in 2023, moving with the rest of the ensemble in soft, endless curves that defy the angular constraints of the human skeleton.
So it’s particularly jarring that Shanahan’s new work, “Ex/Body: de/fame, de/position, de/liberate,” playing December 19-21 at the Edge Theater, has the choreographer and her longtime collaborators—including Partridge and DiMarzio along with Diana Stewart, Kristina Fluty and Jeff Hancock—seated rigidly around a folding table, tensely chanting “I don’t recall” over clenched fists. The dancers shift between static poses as the recorded voice of a lawyer prepping a client for deposition plays at an uncanny speed—just slowly enough to make you squirm in your own seat. This sequence, in keeping with Mad Shak’s ability to bend time, feels like it lasts somewhere between five minutes and five hours. When the ensemble clears the table and chairs from the stage and begin to move with their characteristic fluidity it’s a wave of relief, an exhalation en masse.
The fifty-minute performance is the third and final chapter of Shanahan’s “Ex/Body” series—begun in 2019 with “wake, dam, steel”—a multi-year exploration of how our bodies respond to trauma. Part two, subtitled “strike, vibrate, shatter,” premiered in 2023 minus Shanahan in the ensemble. This was a first for the artist, who normally appears alongside her collaborators. She will return to the stage for this final iteration, mining recent litigious circumstances in her life for inspiration—experiences she describes as physically “armoring.”
“I’ve been put in these situations where my body has responded with icy, incredibly rigid lockdown of self-protection,” Shanahan says. “There’s an irony because the ‘Ex/Body’ project started with this curiosity about the wisdom of trauma and how bodies are so incredibly smart about how they navigate fear and harm.”
Personal, national and global events since 2019 have given Shanahan ample anxiety-inducing material to dissect. Due to the pandemic, “strike, vibrate, shatter” wound up in development for four years. The dancers met over Zoom for much of the process, investigating movement in confined spaces and figuring out how to create deep connections amidst a lockdown. The new piece premieres in a city drawn tight as a fist, its vulnerable residents sheltering behind locked doors as their neighbors patrol the streets with whistles, ready to sound the alarm at the sight of federally deployed, tear-gas-wielding thugs.
It’s no coincidence that questions about the dueling fears (and desires) of being exposed versus being unseen inform the final “Ex/Body.” “This piece is being made in the midst of deep questions with the ensemble about where do we go from here? What do we do with the coexistence of these feelings of the desire to be seen? The desire to hide?” Shanahan muses. “We’re asking ourselves who are we in the moments when we’re pounding the table, and when we get up and move together. We’re living in a deeply wounded society and to expose feels dangerous.”
Other themes are indicated by the subtitle, with slashes (Shanahan describes them as “academic and goofy”) that loosen the meaning of each term from its litigious context. “De/fame” nods to a new stage of Shanahan’s professional life. “As a younger choreographer I was striving to be recognized and felt the disembodiment of that pursuit. I am enjoying getting older and letting go of a lot of that.”
In addition to the literal deposition scene, Shanahan says physical de-positioning is intrinsic to her creative philosophy. “We operate with this pedestrian, upright body and we need it that way to move through the world,” she says. “But a lot of fitness and dance have these militarized values around uprightness, health and youth. They call up what [poet and activist] Sonya Renee Taylor calls the ‘default ideal body.’ Spiral Body Technique is about unhooking from that idea that one can achieve the default ideal visual body.”
“De/liberate” is a commentary on what’s happening in the country right now. “I’ll speak for myself,” Shanahan says. “I’m addicted to my phone. All this information is in free flow and yet our liberties are being eroded moment by moment. I wonder about things that have been characterized as American freedoms—the ability to get anything delivered to your house that day—those very markers of access may be the mask that keeps us from seeing the real nature of loss of liberty.”
These circumstances dovetail with Shanahan’s sustained inquiry into how to be more present, more authentic within our own bodies and with others, and how our fears and desires perpetually get in the way. Though she says that it feels more difficult and dangerous to be vulnerable at this moment, Shanahan continues to bring her experiments in the studio as honestly as she can to the public stage. On the process she says, “it’s a privilege to be in that fluid, humane laboratory.”
—Sharon Hoyer, NewCity, Chicago.
Ex/Body: strike, vibrate, shatter (2023)
It sounds strange to say that a person dancing could be perceived with something other than the eyes—like a parable or fairy tale in the vein of Roald Dahl. But anyone who has attended a performance by Molly Shanahan and her longstanding company Mad Shak knows that when she says—as she did in our recent interview—“Bodies are so much more than what is visually perceived,” she means not only that the vast interior world of individual experience is hidden from view, but that it also can be tapped, extruded and made legible to an audience through movement.
That level of mining sometimes happens on a geologic clock. Shanahan’s current project, “Ex/Body: strike, vibrate, shatter,” which plays October 21 and 22 at Studio5, has been in development for four years. Yes, this stretch was forced by pandemic lockdown, but the Mad Shakers made the most of the time, going ever deeper into a process that took trauma as a jumping-off point for movement exploration. Meeting on Zoom and working on material separately in their respective living rooms, Shanahan says they were “delving into some subterranean territory of, ‘How am I when I am truly by myself, but aware of observation within myself in this mundane, quotidian space of my own home?'”
The first iteration of “Ex/Body” (subtitled “wake, dam, steel”) was in 2019, precipitated by a PTSD diagnosis Shanahan said she is “quite open” about. “It really stunned and informed me. I felt like I was in touch with—in a very uncomfortable way—some incredible body wisdom.”
Shanahan makes it clear “Ex/Body” is not intended to be therapy or directly portray trauma. “Trauma is the research base but it does not define the work any more than PTSD defines the person,” she says. “It can be seen without that layer. The work is not trying to make a point, but it scratches another surface level of how do we see one another.”
“Strike, vibrate, shatter” is performed by longtime Mad Shak collaborators Kristina Fluty and Jeff Hancock, along with Diana Stewart, Detroit-based Maria DiMarzio and Jaicee Partridge, and Los Angeles-based Vaval Victor. Original music was composed—and developed over the same four-year span—by Zachery Meier. Shanahan says this iteration of “Ex/Body” unearths a new deep well of physical information. By probing the physio-emotional cracks, fissures and disassociations (however hairlike they may be in a professional dancer), Shanahan and company tease out new movement possibilities. “It’s literal,” Shanahan says of the title. “The vibration within. You don’t see it in the piece, but as a warm-up we vibrate the flesh to wake up parts of the body that aren’t so easily categorized as bone, muscle, skin. To reintegrate. The body is all sorts of things—it’s flesh that is both mine and unwieldy. And shattering of the perception that my body is what is perceived.”
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. “It must be like high-risk sports, like hang gliding,” she says. “Something that comes with tremendous ease and flow but also feels really dangerous to step into the first time.”
—Sharon Hoyer, NewCity Chicago (2023)
Ex/Body: wake, dam, steel
“Whether one’s had the pleasure of meeting Molly Shanahan in person or simply enjoying her work as a spectator, it’s impossible to deny the brilliance of her artistic mind. With a BA, MA, and PhD to boot, Shanahan navigates choreography and performance with an inherently academic and somatic bent. Even by listening to the audience Mad Shak draws in, one can hear the echo of Shanahan’s intelligence as the Dovetail theater, a converted studio space, is filled with musings on the benefits of experiential anatomy and imagery. The soft premier of ‘Ex/Body: wake, dam, steel,’ continues to promote the insightful, ambiguous and amorphic style Shanahan has worked so tirelessly to develop.
Irrefutably, the 50-minute work is an ode to exploration. The quintet of dancers—Maria DiMarzio, Kristina Fluty, Jeff Hancock, Diana Stewart, and Shanahan—give themselves over to the study of their bodies, the space, and the energy that fills the room. For them, it’s a clear investigation of physical limitations, for each dancer is bound by his or her anatomical structure. From the relaxed, liquid-like nature of certain choreographic sections to the uncomfortably bent appendages that grace the stage in others, an innate duality is apparent as the dance progresses. It’s within this very duality we begin to see the complex layers of this piece brought to light. Riddled with captivating imagery, the repetitious unison phrase work and recognizable gestural motifs in ‘Ex/Body’ encourage introspection for both the dancing and seated bodies in the room.”
—Emma Elsmo, SeeChicagoDance, 2019
Of Whales, Time, and Your Last Attempt to Reach Me
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.
“Of Whales…,” Shanahan’s latest experiment, at Dovetail Studios, reveals a longtime research in presence and awareness that has reached subatomic levels. In the course of fifty minutes, Shanahan and her four fellow dancers transform customary expectations of the audience-performer relationship. Don’t get me wrong; none of the dancers walk into the audience—which is comprised of a single row of chairs at the far end of the Dovetail Studio floor—no attendees are pulled from their seats or asked to move, call back, clap or “do” anything, at least externally. But the invitation to complete attentiveness, to be as deeply curious about the movements and the shared moment as the dancers are themselves is powerful, unstoppable even, yet achieved through gentleness, vulnerability and honesty that can best be described as rigorous.
The disarming of the audience happens somatically; a few minutes into the piece the Mad Shak dancers fall into coordinated breath—not forced timing of inhales and exhales, but a harmonious pacing, much the same way the unison sections prioritize individual authenticity over perfect synchronicity—and the vital signs of the audience follow suit; one can feel the pulse and breath of everyone in the room slow, and their muscles relax into a receptive physical state. “Of Whales…” unfolds as a performance not just to be seen and heard, but inhaled and felt in the blood, perceived with deep, subconscious centers of the brain. Shanahan is obsessive about understanding and dismantling the posturing, self-watching, judging armor put on in performance and, by continually pointing out and weeding out these habits in herself, compelling the audience to do the same. Which, as a critic, I tell you, is equal parts scary and liberating. Judgment is power and, as such, provides a safe wall behind which the viewer becomes voyeur. It also can (and often does) separate the professional critic and casual viewer alike from having a complete experience. In the classic Myers-Briggs model, judging stands in opposition to perceiving; when we are busy asking ourselves what we think about a thing that just happened, we are no longer experiencing what is happening now, but instead engaging ourselves in some internal dialogue that winds up being more wrapped up in our accumulated experiences, biases and categorical means of trying to make sense of things than in perceiving the reality of the moment.
Shanahan and her dancers coax everyone in the room away from this overused churning, judging brain toward deeper perception in large part through the attentiveness they give each other; sometimes standing still and watching a solo, sometimes through cascading movements transmitted via breath, sometimes through touch—soft touch always, the back of a hand or a cheek laid on a back. 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 younger company members, Megan Klein—a powerful, compelling performer—and Detroit-based Maria DiMarzio, the newest addition to Mad Shak, show great promise, but the sensitivity and subtlety of Shanahan, Fluty and Hancock is of a quality that can be cultivated only over decades. I would pay the $18 to watch Hancock eat breakfast cereal for a half hour; his seeming complete confidence and ease with this way of being under the lights stands in fascinating contrast to Shanahan, who visibly grapples with her demons, with her complex relationship between her “real” and her “fake” which provide the thesis for the show and which ultimately are exposed as one and the same.
—Sharon Hoyer, New City Stage, April 2019.
“Molly Shanahan has been a positive force in the Chicago dance community for twenty-five years. With each new work, she continues to captivate audiences with highly nuanced choreography indicative of her ongoing investigation of the creative process…
Part exercise in collective memory, part exploration of choreographic craft, Shanahan’s new work is a forty-seven-minute quartet that engages viewers at the convergence of conscious, subconscious and unconscious memories... Through a sophisticated physical dialogue, set to a sound collage designed by Shanahan with contributions from musician Kevin O’Donnell, the individual dancers collate past experiences into a loose narrative that employs the body as storyteller.”
—Alyssa Motter, New City Stage, March 2018.
“…her dances feel glorious and so, so gratifying. They are unapologetically raw and beautiful to witness. Shanahan’s liquid movement quality is infused with just the right wave of staccato and humor infuses the work as she tugs on the strings of human interaction. She takes movements and gestures we make in our daily lives and laboriously distills their kinesthetic essence in other words, to be human is to dance.”
—Lauren Warnecke, SeeChicagoDance.com, March 2018.
Blackbird’s Ventriloquy
“When Shanahan appears, walking from left to right of center, there are two of her—Shanahan and her shadow—and they move forward in a characteristically Shanahan phrase: organic and idiosyncratic, virtuosic in embodiment, labyrinthine, gestural. Her left hand appears to hold the weight of an organ of moderate size, perhaps the heart or a kidney. She returns to her starting position and repeats the phrase again and again, as if practicing a signature or revising an introduction: my name is, my name is. People think a dancer is her body, but, as Shanahan shows with each investigation of the undercurve, a dancer is how her body thinks.”
– Irene Hsiao, The Chicago Reader, September 2017.
“Blackbird’s Ventriloquy traces its origins to a process Molly Shanahan began in 2005, continuing through her 2007 solo “My Name is a Blackbird,” which led to a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Laboratory artist residency…Shanahan’s efforts throughout have been directed toward a redefinition of the body, its gender and the outside ranges of its ability to move.”
– Michael Workman, New City Chicago, September 2017.
Love With/out Trembling
“Molly Shanahan has a way of making you question the fundamentals of dance. Is movement conscious or unconscious, voluntary or involuntary? A matter of muscles or mind? Why do different people move differently, in ways that are clearly visible yet difficult to define?”
– Laura Molzahn, Chicago Tribune, December 2016.
“Shanahan has transformed herself into an exquisite and unique dancer. Arms, shoulders, hands express a boneless musicality, an inward motion of thought (or not) that shifts to the torso in strong diagonals and oppositions, creating puppet-like angles throughout the body.”
– Laura Molzahn, Chicago Tribune, December 2016.
“...natural, and human, and satisfying. There is no one (no one) who moves quite like Molly Shanahan, and that alone is worth the cost of admission.”
– Lauren Warnecke, Seechicagodance.com, December 2016.
“Chicago choreographer Molly Shanahan’s innate poetry figures in her writing, her subject matter and most certainly her dancing, which is at once contemplative and inward, generous and quietly joyful. Her dances draw attention to spaces—interior spaces, shared spaces, and the immediate space around the curves of a body. Shanahan achieves what I encourage my students to do—she invites-to-be-seen—really because she expresses deep curiosity in motion, and wishes to share that exploration.”
– Carrie Hanson, New City Chicago, October 2016.
And We Shall Be Rid of Them
“Moving and heart-wrenching, the performance often counters the difficulties of its subject matter by foregrounding themes of humor, and the exchange of conscious awareness that take place in the experience of emotional attachments between people…[Hancock and Shanahan] lend the atmosphere a sense of vulnerability to create an emotional context of pause.”
– Michael Workman, New City Chicago, November 2015.
Sharks Before Drowning
Shanahan's work in 2010 was featured on every Chicago “best of 2010” dance listing, and hailed as, "some of the best dancing this city has seen in a long time."
—Asimina Chremos, TimeOut Chicago.
“...one heart-stopping hour…one of the most daring and exciting dances of 2010.”
– Zachary Whittenburg, Time Out Chicago, December 2010.
“[A]n accepting, inclusive vision that destroys the hierarchies and divisions of traditional performance, creating a new kind of theatricality."
– Laura Molzahn, SeeChicagoDance, December 2010.
"Catch a new iteration of the company’s knee-bucklingly stunning Stamina of Curiosity [Sharks Before Drowning], possibly pollinated by Shanahan’s intriguing new research."
– Zachary Whittenburg, Time Out Chicago, December 2010.
“Molly Shanahan finds new territory in this latest iteration of the Stamina of Curiosity project, namely the entry of aggression into her highly sensitive universe and its co-existence with the charged vulnerability of her performances. The language is the same—playful, elemental movements that seem generated by a greater brain of the integrated body; negative space between dancers charged positive, palpable as bodies—but the framework has changed. An awareness of our very yang, masculine culture is referenced directly in a score peppered with iconic ranting monologues from “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “A Few Good Men”—language playful and seductive as Shanahan’s work, generated at the opposite end of the energetic spectrum. Shanahan told me she found an intersection of vulnerability and aggression in the image of sharks, animals that depend on fluid, undulating movement for survival—a movement that adds to their terror in the human imagination.”
– Sharon Hoyer, New City, December 2010.
“a complex, deeply felt meditation on striving and impermanence."
– Laura Molzahn, Chicago Tribune, December 2010.
Stamina of Curiosity: Our Strange Elevations
“The most revelatory performance belonged to Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak in Stamina of Curiosity: Our Strange Elevations, where a quintet of distinctly individual dancers seemingly moved as one molecular force in an alternate universe of movement generated not by their limbs but by some place deep in the gut.”
– Lucia Mauro, Chicago Tribune, October 2009.
“The aesthetic payoff comes in both fluid, seemingly ceaseless, gyre-like phrases that roll over themselves brimming, abundant in the way nature is abundant—herds of antelope in flight from a predator, boiling lava flows or otters at play in a vast ocean—as well as in quiet, meditative moments, the negative space bracketing and bracketed by effortless kinesis.”
– Sharon Hoyer, NewCity Chicago, May 2010.
"The emotional bravery, encyclopedic vocabulary and inimitable imagery of Blackbird becomes a stunning force when multiplied by five bodies. Radically receptive to the audience's energy and attention, the dancers that create Stamina's landscape of tensile structures and rich tangents do so within choreography built to accommodate information about the present moment. Shanahan's unique voice in the dance world calls the act of watching into question and proposes that the best answers may be found within the body itself."
– Zachary Whittenburg, TimeOut Chicago.
“Molly Shanahan both transforms the quotidian into the mystical and pays tribute to such transformation...The choreography's stunning shifts into unison seem to come out of nowhere and yet are of a piece with the individual movement that's gone before. Maybe that’s why these unison interludes, which might last a moment or a good stretch of time, are so surprising; there’s no visible preparation, and no warning when the dancing sinks back into the constantly churning sea of individual moves...The dancing is superb...Kristina Fluty, Tim Heck, Benjamin Law, and Jessie Marasa all have their own distinctive movement personalities, tried in the fire of this physical marathon”
– Laura Molzahn, SeeChicagoDance, May 2010.
“Molly Shanahan grapples with one of the most compelling and elemental ideas in live performance—the energy between the artist and the audience: the power that relationship wields over the moment and the possibilities it opens for the spontaneous generation of art. Her work is, by nature, an ongoing process and the wealth she has mined over the years is evidenced in the nuanced choreography she sets on her own and other companies.
– Sharon Hoyer, New City Chicago, May 2010.
The Delicate Hour
"...a next step in the evolution of a singular voice in Chicago performance...What stones that cover questions raised by bodies on a stage are left unturned by this work? I'd be hard pressed to name three."
– Zachary Whittenburg, TimeOut Chicago, February 2012.
"[Q]uirkiness and grace...like a super slow-motion eruption that toppled their states of hypnosis. Something about it reminded me of a Coen brothers movie...It was all executed perfectly, keeping you smiling and content, but anxious...fierce familiarity and trust...[A]pproachable and sweet and weird."
– Urban Milwaukee Dial, October 2014.
"We expect dance to begin with, well, dancing. The Delicate Hour does the opposite. Molly and her marvelous dancers begin stock-still. They face us. They invite us into the work with a gaze both vulnerable and courageous. They sway slowly and almost imperceptibly side-to-side. It is surprising and uncommonly intense. And just as you wonder how they can possibly proceed from so elevated a place, beautiful arcs of movement flow from this startling beginning."
– David Ravel, Alverno Presents, October 2014.
"...distilled, lean, contemporary dance, brushed only here and there with choice theatrical details tossed like a throw line from the ordinary world. Enacted by Shanahan and three others, Hour offers an often hypnotic parade of gestures, short-lived partnerships and tableaus teasing the consciousness with suggestion and reverie. Whole stretches — some of its most powerful moments, in fact — are in slow motion, so that fairly simply constructs are given time to build to enormous punch...For all its surface simplicity, it is marvelously complex, down to and including one feverish, choral exercise, the foursome clustered together, repeating the same sequence over and over, faster and faster, magnificently testing the dancers' speed, timing and synchronicity. The gnarly human context of surrender, clinging and loss vies with the intricate abstract design — you're torn between trope and geometry, echoing a back-and-forth, swaying imagery in the piece. Just as its titular topic, twilight, is bittersweet and piquant, the balance between structure and feeling invites a meditation on dance itself.
– Sid Smith, The Chicago Tribune, February 2012.
My Name is a Blackbird
“Lush, super-rich, exquisitely detailed and extremely sensual…Shanahan’s ability to ‘invite being seen’ (a phrase from postmodern choreographer Deborah Hay) is remarkable.”
– Asimina Chremos, TimeOut Chicago, April 2007.
“Riveting in both its approach to movement and Shanahan's detailed performance, it gets big payoffs from small effects, like the suspense implicit in a foot hovering motionless above the floor.”
– Laura Molzahn, Chicago Reader, May 2010.
“Each performance of Blackbird is an improvisation and is so process-oriented, yet so rigorous, that watching the piece at its best is like watching the artist living—witnessing the human mind at its most intent with all the failures and transcendences that come with complete commitment.”
–Sharon Hoyer, NewCity Chicago, May 2010.