A few spots remain. April 11+12 Spiral Body Techniques® + Restart/Mark Workshop with Molly Shanahan

Spiral Body Techniques® + Restart/Mark Workshop

April 11 + 12

Saturday 11:30am–3:30pm | Sunday 1:00–5:00pm
Chicago | The Rooted Space | $160 | No one turned away for lack of funds.

This two-day workshop brings Spiral Body Techniques® (SBT) into dialogue with Restart/Mark, a collaborative practice developed within the SBT lineage and a cornerstone of Molly Shanahan’s choreographic work with Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak.

Both days begin with a Spiral Body Techniques® class with Shanahan, establishing a shared physical and perceptual foundation through spiral, yield-and-release-and-assert, gestural-spatial relationship; and fluidity, falling, failure, and forgiveness. Rather than organizing movement through fixed shape or muscular control, SBT invites participants into adaptive, responsive and relational pathways that honor the intelligence of the material body and the complexity of lived experience.

Following the class and a short break, our work shifts into Restart/Mark, a framework for spontaneous composition that centers impulse and self-trust, forgiveness of self and other as a rigorous practice, and shared experience as compositional tools. Insofar as some Restart/Mark is ensemble-based, it is about as far from a college-level “group project” as one can get.

Restart/Mark invites participants to engage movement as a relational, negotiated process, emphasizing body’s capacity for decision, attention, interruption, forgetting, and repair within live practice. The focus moves away from leadership/power, display, or perfection and toward clarity of relation, adaptability-in-presence, and trust as ongoing practices.

Central to this work is the discipline of benevolent observation: attending to oneself and others without harsh judgment or comparison, both of which can become immediately internalized as self-judgment, blame, shame, and perfectionism.

Demanding and rigorous, Restart/Mark cultivates curiosity and compassion while creating a “safe-enough” container in which personal histories can be present without discussion, explanation, or elaboration. This is not therapy, but it can be deeply regulating and affirming.

Restart/Mark challenges traditional models of dance education and creation that rely on surveillance, obedience, competition, approval from an external gaze, or reiteration of “ideal” bodily aesthetics. Instead, it offers an inclusive and responsive approach to movement, teaching, and practice that values experimentation, failure, and spontaneity as essential components of skill-building and creative inquiry.

Participants are encouraged to work with small, tolerable doses of vulnerability held within a clear, time-limited structure, and to redirect attention toward impulse, repetition, and relationship.

This workshop is open to all movers with some experience in somatic or contemporary movement practices and who are interested in this work. While grounded in Spiral Body Techniques®, the emphasis is on application and interaction.

Advance registration required.

Space is limited to 15 participants. We will open registration to single-day participants if space allows.

Please reach out with questions.