Mad Shak in “Ex/Body: de/fame, de/position, de/liberate”/Photo: Erika Ruch
“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.”
Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak’s “Ex/Body: de/fame, de/position, de/liberate” at the Edge Theater, 5451 North Broadway. Friday-Sunday, December 19-21 at 7:30pm. $20-$45. Ticket at mollyshanahanspiralbody.com.
