What bodies
know
For thirty-two years, Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak has made dances that loosen the armor we carry, on stage, in the studio, and in the classroom. Here’s what that work makes possible, and where it’s going.
“If the body of a dancer is not the thing perceived in a dance performance, then what is? … It is unnamed, and comprised of the circulation of energy and the power of attention.”
Pictured at the Bogliasco Foundation, Italy, where Molly was a fellow in 2019.
Could dance save civilization?
Though I believe in it deeply, making claims about the importance of my own work doesn’t come naturally. In 2009, our board of directors and I wrestled with that challenge, asking something like: how do we make the case for our work without pretending it’s going to save civilization, but without downplaying the significance of its impact? Board members wrote a genuinely persuasive appeal, and we sent it in mid-April, near the bottom of the recession. Retail sales were falling, the housing market was collapsing, banks were still trying to extricate themselves from federal bailouts. Excellent timing!
Seventeen years later, I recognize that I am the one best positioned to make the case for my work. I have also had dancers, audiences, students, critics, and funders reflect back to me, again and again, the things I most hope the work can do.
I have thought often about my decision to remain in dance, a field still shaped by ageism, ableism, economic precarity and, strangely, a persistent devaluation of embodied knowledge. And still, I have cultivated something that is both difficult to name and profoundly important to what I understand as quality of life. It’s an honor to contribute, especially now, as AI raises increasingly complicated questions about sustainability, creativity, presence, and what is uniquely human.
Time and again, I have stewarded spaces where I—fellow dancers, students, observers—loosen some of the physical armoring we carry through daily life. Even for moments at a time, when we drop this hardening, something profound changes in the entire experience. We become more available to sensation, to ourselves, to one another, and, in performance, to an audience.
We become more human and more humane.
I have watched myself and countless dancers discover forms of authority that do not depend on domination, and audiences recognize something of themselves in bodies very different from their own. I have seen people become more curious about what their bodies inherently know and less interested in forcing them into prescribed ideas of what they should be.
Could dance save civilization? That would be a lofty claim. But it’s not an outrageous question from which to live, work, and create. Our capacities to pay attention, remain curious, inhabit our bodies more fully in the presence of others, and recognize another person’s complexity, difference, and inherent beauty are worth cultivating. This is part of what Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak contributes to the world.
Ex/Body:
Re-presented October 1–4, 2026
The Edge Theater, Chicago
Ex/Body began with my own experience as a survivor and a deep respect for the body’s capacity for response, coping, and protection. Only recently has my story entered the work directly. This multi-year project has generated multiple works, including wake, dam, steel (2019) and strike, vibrate, shatter (2023). The newest piece, de/fame, de/position, de/liberate (2025), opens with a question: “Did all of this start with General Hospital?” It is about rape culture and the systems and language around it: what it means to speak out or be silenced; who is believed; how narratives are formed; how institutions respond; how knowledge gets questioned, translated, narrowed, manipulated, or overtaken.
The week we brought it back this October, the Cornell case was front and center in the news, and audiences inevitably made the connection. We are gratified that our work is so often seen as relevant and timely, and this piece perhaps more than any other, as it addresses a complicated, longstanding systemic harm we continue to confront in this moment in history.
We heard repeatedly from survivors that the piece helped them feel seen, heard, and valued. That alone was worth re-presenting the work.
“…an uncommon ability to evoke meaning from abstract gesture.”
“One of the best pieces of performance I’ve seen in a long time, and I see a lot of performance.”
“Ex/Body is still with me, and I expect it will be for a long time.
Your movement always connects the dancers in ways that only you can do. You engage them as full humans and not only as vessels for your choreography. Your work is about so much more than the body. I was stunned and humbled by the level of honesty and vulnerability in this piece … there was an additional transparency that hit me with its strength and integrity.
We’ve all learned how to hide our trauma, but you have found a way to work with it and create from it that shows a way of being that is a gift to those of us that witness your work.”
“While the topic of the work is challenging, you [all of you] were so embodied, so direct in your carving of your movement and existence in the space, that I never felt overwhelmed. … I could absorb the narrative, verbal and kinesthetic, without feeling swept inside of it. I never felt ‘uncomfortable’ in my own body, watching. Though I did feel completely focused on the unfolding.”
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Thirty-two years.
Three ways the work lives.
Founded in Chicago in 1994, MS/MS is an ensemble of dancers, thinkers, and mostly-introverted embodied researchers. Our work centers what Shanahan calls a “virtuosity of compassion,” a practice where vulnerability and technical rigor live side by side, without punishment. It celebrates bodies shaped by age, injury, resilience, and real life.
Evening-length works that ask what happens between performer and audience
“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.”
“Shanahan and her longtime collaborators Kristina Fluty and Jeff Hancock vibrate on the same plane … the sensitivity and subtlety of Shanahan, Fluty and Hancock is of a quality that can be cultivated only over decades.”
“A singular voice in Chicago dance”
Dance-making as embodied research
People matter. Dancers are not interchangeable. And our uniqueness shapes the work we make. In the studio, Shanahan trusts dancers as cultural thinkers and wise, agentic beings who bring immense knowledge that needn’t be taught, controlled, or disciplined. Through movement approaches, improvisational scores, collaborative invention, and rigorous observation, they become active co-authors of the work that we make.
In Restart/Mark, a mode Shanahan and dancers have developed over decades, we practice radical forgiveness: a discipline in service to creation without power-over. Stopping, repeating, hesitating, forgetting, and movement that comes from trusting one’s impulses all shape performance-worthy material. That material is wordlessly integrated with the energy that forms when people build something from nothing, and infused with both confidence and empathy. It invites observers to see without the layers of judgment that rank human worth. Shanahan and ensemble member Jeff Hancock taught Restart/Mark at the National Dance Education Organization’s national conference in Detroit (2025), and Shanahan teaches it in university residencies.
What we mean by trauma-aware
Our commitment to a virtuosity of compassion is both an artistic and a public good. It means cultivating rigor without cruelty, recognizing that bodies carry histories, including trauma, and creating conditions in which vulnerability, difference, and embodied intelligence are understood as sources of creative possibility rather than limitations.
We are a trauma-aware organization, not only in policy, but in practice: it shapes the way we teach, rehearse, and make dances together. We start from the understanding that trauma is common, touching most people, if not everyone, at some point in their lives, and that most of us have also experienced oppression from the systems we live within. As dancers, we know in particular that injury is a trauma experience in body, mind, and spirit, and that injury and body pain are very common. We also know that dance training traditions have included approaches that are disciplinary, judgmental, and abusive. Research, experience, and countless personal accounts tell us this has affected nearly every dancer we encounter, and scores of audience members who have a history in dance.
All of this shapes how people learn, so we make room in our classes and rehearsals for different paces, types, and modes of learning, all within the context of a rigorous, vigorous, joyful dancing experience. Our approach favors movement that helps the nervous system stay out of threat response, so the body can learn rather than brace. This is fundamental to the unforced flow, spiral, and wave-pattern at the heart of our movement. Within the framework of every class and rehearsal, dancers have options to adapt, modify, and attend to their own needs. Much of this overlaps with the study of somatics, but even Western somatic approaches can reiterate the idea that there are ideal bodies, ideal ways of moving, and optimal alignment. We work to set those ideals aside.
Many in our community are neurodivergent, and some, including our founder, live with disability. The work asks dancers to soften, not as a lack of discipline, but as a way of honoring kinds of bodily knowledge that dance, and the world at large, too often ignore.
My Name is a Blackbird: Dancing Toward a Productive Ontology of Change
My Name is a Blackbird (2006–07), Shanahan’s critically acclaimed evening-length solo, was a turning point in the company’s history. It transformed her approach to body, dance, and performance, and its discoveries became the ground for the new ensemble she formed in its wake. Time Out Chicago named it one of the top ten dance moments of the decade. In 2019 she completed her PhD in Dance at Temple University, mentored by Dr. Karen E. Bond. Her dissertation, a theoretical autobiography, returns to Blackbird through a thousand-page archive of rehearsal transcripts, conversations with collaborators, audience responses, and her own journals.
In conversation with the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the somatic innovators Moshe Feldenkrais and Emilie Conrad, it pursues Shanahan’s abiding questions about form and identity: how what a body has lived through shapes the way it moves, and what becomes possible when those patterns loosen. Writing it meant reckoning, on the page, with her own experience as a survivor of sexual trauma, a reckoning that later found public form in Ex/Body. Her essay drawn from the project, “My Name is a Blackbird: release, transparency, agency,” received the inaugural Linda Rolfe New Writers Prize from Research in Dance Education.
“For years, Molly Shanahan … has meticulously examined the alchemy that occurs between performer and audience … what happens to the observer through the act of watching, and the energetic space between all involved.”
Spiral Body Techniques®
Developed by Shanahan through decades of choreographic research and somatic self-study, SBT trains dancers in fluidity, complexity, and whole-body intelligence. It also pushes back on old ideas of virtuosity built on control, conformity, and a single ideal body.
It is rigorous, vigorous, full-out dancing: complex phrases that grow in length and detail, building real-time memory, clarity, and stamina. What changes is how dancers get there: through spiral and release rather than force, in deep connection with one another, with moments of meditative stillness, and with ease, safety, and joy.
Every class is composed live, in direct response to the dancers in the room. Teacher and students learn the phrase together. At its heart is benevolent observation: attending closely to self, other, and movement without harsh judgment, so that our busy minds have something to do besides self-judge, perfect, or dissociate.
Through Process to Performance, our annual workshop for professionals, and iterations of that workshop for university communities at Purdue University and Northwestern University, as well as our annual teacher certification, the practice now reaches university dancers, professionals, and adult students far beyond the ensemble.
“I have learned more about the way my body works and moves in Dr. Shanahan’s courses than in any dance class I have ever taken.”
“She has… helped me repattern my approach to movement. I have an increased awareness for subtle movement and transitions and move with greater care and less effort.”
“I had to relearn a different way of moving and to release my muscles in ways I was not used to, but now I feel better than ever when I move.”
“Never would I have thought it would have such a huge impact on my life physically, mentally, emotionally.”
“She cultivates a space of genuine compassion and non-judgemental awareness of ourselves and everyone else in the space.”
“No other residency has created the immediate sense of community, connection, and embodied empathy and confidence like Molly’s did.”
“Thank you for creating such generous containers for deep, nuanced, and sustained research. It’s a real gift to be part of them, and I’m grateful for all that I’m learning through this practice.”
“Your choreography, teaching approach, and research in SBT deeply resonate with me as an artist and have helped shape what I hope to pursue and embrace as I continue to grow in my career.”
“This work has changed my life.”
Remains, Animated
Ex/Body was a multi-year project, but it doesn’t define us. For thirty-two years, our work has been about how bodies carry meaning, often in spite of our intentions: through memory, relationship, adaptation, and contradiction, and through everything we learn simply by living in a body.
What bodies know, remember, survive, and make possible.
Artists first
Because of the organizational choices we’ve made over many years, our overhead is extremely low, so your gift pays the actual people who make the art. In thirty-two years, our annual budget has never exceeded $100,000, and about 70% of it goes to paying our people: dancers, collaborators, and our artistic director. Nearly everything else goes to creative process and production. For Ex/Body, that meant paying our collaborators. It meant renting rehearsal and performance space and covering production, technical, music, and insurance costs. It meant paying me.
For more than thirty years we have stayed rooted in Chicago and deliberately chosen lean administration over institutional expansion. That independence has let us take real creative risks, and it means individual donors are what sustain us. Dance is expensive to make and notoriously bad at paying for itself. Ticket sales, grants, and teaching income all matter, but no single source covers what it costs to pay artists and to make and present work.
As we set our sights on growing our budget, our focus stays the same: paying artists. Growth, for us, means that the people who make this work are paid more fairly, for more of the time it truly takes. We know that growth will depend largely on individual donors who want to see our work, our artists, and our founder thrive.
We are actively seeking a particular kind of donor: someone who believes, as we do, that dance artists should be paid for the work of making dances.
Gifts from individuals range from $50 to $3,000, and in recent years more supporters have given $500 or more. While many factors determine what any person gives, we encourage those with the means and interest to give at the higher levels of support. Every gift pays artists.
Make a tax-deductible giftBy mail. Make your check payable to Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak and send it to 6546 N. Maplewood Ave, Chicago, IL 60645.
Through a donor-advised fund. Recommend a grant to Mad Shak Dance Company, dba Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak, EIN 36-4015428.
Questions? mollyshanahanmadshak@gmail.com
What it means to be a nonprofit
Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization: we exist, by law and by choice, to serve the public good. We do so by creating and sharing artistically rigorous, innovative dance that challenges conventional ideas about whose bodies, experiences, and ways of knowing are valued. Through performances, education, and public engagement, we enrich Chicago’s cultural life, support the livelihoods of artists, and cultivate curiosity, critical inquiry, and compassion as essential elements of a thriving society.
No one owns us and no one profits from us: every dollar we raise goes back into the work. We’re guided by a volunteer board of directors, and we report our finances publicly each year.
It also means your gift is tax-deductible. And it means something less often said:
Nonprofit doesn’t mean unpaid.
Dancers, designers, and our artistic director are skilled professionals, and paying them fairly is the heart of our mission, not a cost to be minimized. Like most arts nonprofits, we earn some of what we need through tickets and teaching, but the rest has to be given. That’s where you come in.
Kristina Fluty
Jeff Hancock
Diana Stewart
Maria DiMarzio
Jaicee Partridge Lighting Designer Joshua Paul Weckesser
Kristina Fluty
Paul Holmquist
Michael Rogalski
Kevin Simmons Interested in joining the board? Reach out.
