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Canadian-born Molly Shanahan founded Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak in 1994 as the home for her artistic projects after completing her Masters of Arts in Dance/Choreography at The Ohio State University.
Shanahan’s creative achievements are increasingly recognized across the field of contemporary dance, evidenced by critical and audience response and by organizations like Links Hall (Chicago) and the National Performance Network, among others, that have endorsed and supported her work. Shanahan’s work has been performed in Chicago at The Dance Center of Columbia College, Links Hall, Storefront Theater, and others. Outside Chicago, Mad Shak has performed at Dance Theater Workshop, Tangente (Montreal), and as a featured artist at the National Performance Annual Meeting in 2005, among others. In 2004 Mad Shak was the recipient of the Chicago Dance and Music Alliance’s Elizabeth F. Cheney Dance Achievement Award, citing Shanahan’s evening-length projects "So-Called Repetition," "The Poems of Replaceable Kings," and "Eye Cycle" as exemplary instances of impact on the field and promise for continued innovation. Following a rigorous selection process, Shanahan was named one of four choreographers selected as a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist for 2006/07. She was named by Time Out Chicago as one of the “20 People to Watch in 2007” and most recently received an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship Award in choreography in 2008.
Shanahan is influenced by Feldenkrais, Skinner Releasing Technique, improvisation, collaboration and body-mind studies, as well as early experience with urban social dance and Afro-Caribbean forms. She is on the dance faculty at Northwestern University and teaches throughout Chicago and in residencies associated with the creation and presentation of her work.
I explore the body's internal impulses and its innate potential to express without further explanation. My body, collaborations, and performances serve as related laboratories for research. I value spontaneous composition, vulnerability, and a quiet ego, and pursue a virtuosic access to my memory, capacity for awareness and integration of the occluded aspects of my body and self. I ask questions and am drawn toward those that destabilize my assumptions about performance and the body.
I am fascinated by the collision, marriage, negotiation, and collaboration between knowing and not-knowing; planning and spontaneity; curiosity and control. My process involves research in the studio and in performance that expands my potential to move in a state of awareness where habit and new discovery remain in constant dialogue. “My Name is a Blackbird” exemplifies this approach.
I have stepped outside many conventions of contemporary dance movement, which feels bound by outdated habits that inhibit freedom in the ribs, belly, and pelvis — arguably the most expressive areas of the body. I have softened compulsive holding patterns and in doing so confronted the vulnerability that comes with letting go of parasitic motivations. Through this I discovered an emerging expertise in new movement and a renewed vibrancy to my curiosity about live performance.
Approaching “Stamina of Curiosity”, I find myself on new creative terrain. I am intrigued by what remains to be discovered about my potential to create movement performance that can be shared publicly in ways that inspire and are relevant for observers, regardless of scale.
–Molly Shanahan
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