I danced and collaborated with Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak throughout 2008.
A one-night-only presentation Saturday of Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak at Milwaukee’s Pitman Theatre marked the culmination of a project begun over a year ago. I spoke with Shanahan the morning after the premiere of Stamina of Curiosity: Our Strange Elevations about the night itself and her journey to it.
Benjamin Law, Kristina Fluty, Jessica Marasa, Molly Shanahan and Timothy Heck. Photo by William Frederking.
Molly Shanahan spent much of this decade paring her creative process to the core. Eye Cycle (2003-2005) involved just one other dancer, and the following series, My Name is a Blackbird (2005-2009), enlisted artists in other media but in performance featured Shanahan alone. Stamina of Curiosity was a return to ensemble dancemaking that sought to keep intact the discoveries and progress she made in these chamber works; its half-dozen-plus installments, subtitled, were presented in a variety of venues – Elevations was preceded by First, This; This Parliament; Minerva’s Laugh and my answer is yes.
“When I’m teaching, rehearsing or coaching I feel really present in my body,” Shanahan explains. “If I’m pulling back on some level, I’m acutely aware of it.” The relatively-set movement scores of Stamina were a challenging reentry from the structured improvisation and live study of her solo work. “In Blackbird, I could play with risk in a zone built to facilitate that. Improvisation is flirted with in Stamina of Curiosity but, in general, this new work is much more composed. It took some time to acknowledge the fear that that brought up for me, that sense that I might crumple or fail or do something onstage that was ‘outside’ [of my goals for Stamina].”
Half an hour before the show last night, I realized how scared I was – it was like worrying a rollercoaster was going to fall off a track or something, like vertigo. You want to stay diligent about what you’ve practiced while staying alive within it. I thought, ‘Well, I’m either going to go with that, get worried and freak out, or take my own advice, accept how I’m feeling and see where it goes.’ Once the show was underway, though, I felt like we were able to tap into experiencing live performance in a way that created changes in the work without derailing it. But for about five minutes before the show, a little bit of doom definitely set in, for all of us.
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