Mad Shak Dance Company

Spiral Body Techniques
Alone-Together Movement Practice with Molly Shanahan
Daily at 9:30am EST/8:30am CST ~30-mins
Starting July 20, 2021

Zoom information here 

These practices are open to everyone, regardless of level. 

PAY-WHAT-YOU-CHOOSE DONATION STRUCTURE

Please pay for your session after-the-fact. Why? These practices are offered from the heart of my process, which is channeled in the moment and intended to spring from and sometimes transmit my deepest creative and movement questions. I am not packaging them for sale. If you do not find value in this work, move along. If you do, please find a meaningful and right-sized way to support it. 

Donations go directly to Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak (Mad Shak Dance Company). By making a donation you are supporting my dance company's ability to compensate freelance dancers and the general operations of this small non-profit organization that I have been making and making with since 1994. 

It’s important to me that these sessions remain accessible to anyone who wants them. For that reason, I'm suggesting a base donation amount of $7 per session, adjustable up or down given your circumstances.

OF NOTE:

—The schedule is subject to change. (See above guidance on paying after-the-fact.) Schedule changes or interruptions will be emailed from this site. Follow me or Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak on Facebook if you use that platform. When possible and in the event of occasional cancellation/s, an audio recording of the previous session/s will be made available via the Facebook Spiral Body Techniques Community (feel free to join). 
—These practices cannot be monetized in ways that are congruent with capitalist systems. Use your best judgement on selecting a donation amount. 
—I do not intend to be a fitness, life, or creative coach. Why mention this? My social media feed and sometimes my inbox is inundated with long, emoji-rich and formulaic rhetoric designed to market the sale of experiences and guidance that promise the delivery of practically-universal human values like fulfillment in work and/or love, and greater ease, joy, and satisfaction in life. I am with you in valuing those things. More to the point, movement is y/our birthright and if by sharing my practice you feel inspired in yours, those values are closer than we might recognize.
—Give credit where credit is due. Join me in citing sources in live/embodied practice, while retaining the spontaneity and orality of dance. Please cite me/my research when/if you borrow or adapt an idea in your own creative/teaching space. Embodied practitioners must do this as a way of strengthening the non-textual fibers that vitalize our research and facilitate its healthy translation across traditional systems of knowledge. 
—When offering SBT from home I will use a quality external podcast microphone and will do my best to optimize sound settings.  My cat, Zemmi, will meow, sometimes plaintively and maybe annoyingly. 

CONTEXT

I'm in a liminal phase of quasi-return and quasi-turning-away-from some of what I believed I might return to when the pandemic started...when I started my PhD...when T***p  was elected... etc. 

All of the above and more stoked a complicated relationship with my body, the role of effort/force and pressure to change, and my relationship with the myriad gazes I experience internally and externally. A few years of digging into rhizome theory and rhizomatic writing has left me critical of the pervasive pressure to achieve continuous forward-going or ascending improvement.  As I move beyond affiliation with some of those gazes and pressures, my understandings of fitness, form, and function morph, blur, and sometimes elude previous understandings. I find the dance field stubbornly shape-ist, yet I also find that my perpetual resistance is exhausting and counter productive when it's played out in one's tissue. As a white woman I recognize both my privilege and that this resistance-exhaustion dynamic is made more extreme the further one gets from what Sonya Renee Taylor describes as "the default body" of straight/white/cis/heteronormative/maleness. 

This has not been an easy or straightforward time for anyone, and for me it has meant regenerating my relationship with dance/Dance and movement. I've had moments of unanticipated and sometimes worrisome stasis, and periods when my body wanted only to be moved by visceral impulse and rarely through the kinds of hurling, curving, and whirring through space that have previously been sources of pleasure, delight, and identity. Surreally, this odd static tug has presented even when I've been immersed in my almost-daily teaching, rehearsal, or movement-in-water practices. It's weird and hard; there is grief. Maybe you can relate. My body has needed a type of rest that feels unfamiliar, risky, and subversive; I have felt caught between wanting to move yet being stalled in a tunnel of disbelief and disenchantment, anger-embers, and deep longing for a different way into or through my passion for movement without self-objectification. Recently I've started to find my way both "back" and "forward," with self-love, deep appreciation for movers of all kinds, and a renewed love for the quiet pulse of imagination through which new human-ness becomes possible and shape vibes with change, decay, and restoration. 

The practice is a way for me to narrate and share my navigation through these complications. The practice has to allow and to itself be adaptable to prolonged periods of vulnerability, hesitation, and uncertainty as much as glimmers of confidence, epiphany, and agency. The practice rests on a lifelong belief (and, well, scientific fact) that movement sustains. The practice stems from a desire to return to sustaining practices even when they don't make sense or align with the "outcomes" I spent 25+ years focused on as a young choreographer. 

This is the ethos of my current inquiry through movement, and the spirit through which I invite you to join me. 

My influences in no particular order: 
—me, dancing, mostly before, hopefully again
—Moshe Feldenkrais (writing and practice)
—Emilie Conrad's The Continuum Method (writing and practice)
—ongoing work with the Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak ensemble (Jeff Hancock, Kristina Fluty, Maria DiMarzio, Diana Stewart)
—French theorists Deleuze and Guattari concepts of rhizome, haecceity, the fold, and becoming
—Dr. Karen Bond (teaching/advising, writing)
—my family
—groundhogs, deer, rabbits, hawks, fear/fascination with snakes, and Zemmi
—scant exposure to Gaga Movement
—the Great Lakes, especially Huron
—Gil Hedley
—my students
—Stephen Nachmanovich (Free Play and The Art of Is)
—Sonya Renee Taylor (The Body is Not an Apology) 
—David Whyte
—solitude

Zoom information here