Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak

Founded in 1994, Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak (MS/MS) is a Chicago-based contemporary dance company rooted in choreographer and movement educator Molly Shanahan’s long-standing commitment to embodied research, collaborative rigor, and movement practices that challenge conventional ideas of virtuosity and the “ideal” body.

Over three decades, MS/MS has cultivated a distinctive aesthetic shaped by Shanahan and the dancers, thinkers, and embodied researchers who have contributed through sustained studio practice, performance-making, and cross-disciplinary collaboration with composers, videographers, and other artists. This evolving community now includes Spiral Body Techniques® teachers and dozens of adult-professional students.

MS/MS creates evening-length performances and pedagogical experiences that support personal and collective transformation for professional and emerging artists, adult students, and audiences. Our work centers innovative movement vocabularies, creative risk, body equity on stage, and deep inquiry into the observer/observed relationship. We blend rigorous choreographic exploration with somatic and creative practices that resist dominant aesthetics rooted in perfectionism, thinness, youth, and workaholism.

At the core of MS/MS is a commitment to embodiment as agency—not only artistic expression, which is paramount, but interwoven with this value a site of repair, power, and cultural knowledge. We are a trauma-aware organization. Many in our community are neurodivergent, and some—including our founder—live with disability. MS/MS creates work that resonates across difference and upholds feminist and LGBTQ+ identities and values.

MS/MS celebrates bodies in their explicit and implicit difference: bodies shaped by age, injury, resilience, and the real conditions of lived experience. The company centers what Shanahan calls a “virtuosity of compassion,” a practice in which vulnerability and technical rigor coexist without punitive demands. The work asks dancers to soften, not as a lack of discipline, but as a political and personal stance that honors forms of embodied intelligence often minimized or erased by traditional dance culture.

A central and newly formalized aspect of MS/MS is Spiral Body Techniques® (SBT), a movement method and teacher-certification program developed by Shanahan through decades of performance, research, and trauma-aware teaching. SBT foregrounds the intelligence of the material body, personal agency, and a disciplined practice of attending to self, space, and others without habitual comparison or judgment. It affirms that excellence in performance is inseparable from healing, liberation, and innovation. These qualities emerge when dancers are trusted as cultural thinkers and pedagogy is understood as relational and emergent rather than prescriptive or obedience-based.

For more than thirty years, MS/MS has remained rooted in Chicago while deliberately choosing not to pursue conventional markers of institutional expansion. This choice fostered adaptability, nimbleness, and a sustained capacity for creative and organizational risk, allowing the company to produce critically acclaimed work across shifting economic and cultural conditions. At the same time, this independence has brought structural limitations that MS/MS now addresses with clarity and intention.

Today, MS/MS is building on its agile history while evolving its artist-led structure to support long-term resilience, access, and legacy planning. Current priorities include sustaining the creation and presentation of work, paying artists—including the artistic director—and aligning organizational growth with the company’s values of humane practice, embodied inquiry, and the radical power of seeing and being seen. We recognize that creative excellence rarely conforms to repeatable structures or externally imposed “best practices,” and we remain committed to models that allow for cycles of production and restoration.

MS/MS has been honored with strong critical response, receives support from Chicago-based funders, individual and board donors, and has long been recognized for “punching above its weight” in self-produced contexts. Our sustained contribution to Chicago’s dance ecology has earned us the grace to define, at least in part, what best practices look like for our community: prioritizing lean administration, deep collaboration, and ongoing commitment to artists whose bodies, identities, and lived experiences have too often been marginalized in dance.