Established in Chicago by choreographer Molly Shanahan, Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak has for 25 years provided the home for Shanahan's movement, performance research, and collaborations with dancers, designers, composers, videographers, and organizational partners.

MS/MS is led by Shanahan and administrative partner/longtime ensemble member Kristina Fluty in partnership with a nationally-based board of directors and other champions who remain focused on supporting creative research and experimentation. These values foster MS/MS’s agility and adaptability in times of fiscal change, and the ordinary but often overlooked personal and organizational changes that characterize artist-run, and especially dancer-run, companies in the United States. Simply put, people and organizations change, infinitely resist becoming a “brand,” and rarely does creative excellence conform to repeatable structures. MS/MS prioritizes creative process and those nuanced approaches to organizational growth, broadly defined, that cultivate temporary communities, foster collaboration, nurture experimentation into seeing and being seen through the performance of movement in relationship, and allow for cycles of production and restoration.

MS/MS has been honored by stellar critical response, receives funding from a handful of (primarily) Chicago-based organizations, individual and board donors, and has a long history of "punching above their weight" in self-produced contexts.

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Shanahan developed Spiral Body Techniques™ through more than two decades of improvisation, exploration, and teaching of movement that honors body’s curves, spirals, and multi-dimensional intelligence and is informed by Shanahan’s study of the Feldenkrais Method and Continuum Movement. She holds a PhD from Temple University. Shanahan’s life work mines the potential for dance in practice and performance to instigate ‘virtuosity of compassion,’ her term for a more compassionate lens through which to engage with the world from embodied expertise and pleasure.

During the pandemic, Shanahan began offering Spiral Body alone-together guided movement practices on Zoom. This by-necessity solution to the problems created by lockdown opened up rich possibilities for participants from all over the world, and in the process fostered curiosity for downplaying emphasis on the visual aspect of dance. The alone-together practice was born of and exists in paradox: a visual form can thrive in unseen spaces.