Molly Shanahan is Mad Shak Dance. A modern dancer based out of Chicago, Shanahan has brought her critically acclaimed solo piece, My Name is a Blackbird , to the Joyce Soho for three performances this weekend. The Chicago Tribune reviewed the piece by saying, "The experience can baffle and bore. But it also prompts intense introspection."

The Joyce Soho is as intimate as it gets in New York. The audience sits right up almost on top of the stage. In performance, Shanahan will occasionally catch a gaze, and then seem to use the moment, the interaction, in her next movement. It is a visceral exchange. The audience is at once looking upon the performance and of it.

Eight Million Stories.com: How did you first conceive of “Blackbird”?

Molly Shanahan: The first thought came while I was staring out my window in Chicago. It was about five years ago. It was a time when I was getting more interested in my reflective self. Looking out in my yard, which is a very rare little spot in the city. I had this question about presence in all things, all living things, and how experience, in human form, how much that dictates and how much that limits life.

I wrote a poem about it at that time, about identity and how we become attached to ourselves and our identity and whether or not there’s a way to daydream about a different identity. The piece could be called “My Name is a …” about anything. I was playing around with identity and form.

8MS: How long did it take you to go from that moment to when you started developing the piece.

MS: Another three to four months. I started sketching the piece in 2004 and 2005 for a festival performance. I wanted something new for the festival but I only had a week, so I created an architecture around which I could improvise. That was the first sketch. There were lots of theatrical elements within that sketch that don’t show up anymore. What was curious though was that it suggested a new vocabulary for me. It was more a celebration of my idiosyncracies. I sort of felt like it was nudging me from some of my learned habits from contemporary dance and at that point started cooking up for me what would be a really rich creative process to delve into these things.

I spent a lot of time organizing the project, getting support for this project because I knew I wanted to involve some collaborators even though it would be a solo movement investigation. I was working on it during that time but there was about a year where the focus was on just making sure that the pieces were in place so that I could then spend the last phase, during 2007, really focusing on how the movement was evolving and how I was understanding the movement. I needed to focus on understanding the spontaneous composition.

I was building skills to be able to live compose something in the moment. I had the vocabulary and I had to create the atmosphere to let the observer know that they were in this environment. That they were in this project as opposed to another project and that they would know that this was start to finish improvised.

8MS: Are there limits that you put on yourself within which you improvise?

MS: Yes and no. There are some constraints, not limits (although I guess they’re interchangeable), however the constraints are about how movement is generated as opposed to what occurs. Those constraints would be that I’m pursuing a rigorous honesty of movement whether it is new movement or learned movement or somehow derived from the contemporary canon of dance as I know it.

That is a constraint that I can chew on for a really long, long time. It’s something that has to do with my state of mind and how much choice I have in my physical response to a variety of stimuli: the music, the energy and adrenaline of performance. Probably the main stimuli are the energy and adrenaline that come from being observed. I don’t think the Adrenaline is a necessity but there is a real and cellular change when we’re we being observed. I was thinking about cockroaches the other day. They know when they’re being observed. That’s happening in performance all the time. The audience is being invited to observe. That brings an overt quality to the performance.

There is also the shifting that occurs between a conscious composer and a moving being… allowing for inertia and gravity and forces to play against or on me in a sense. That’s kind of a totality back and forth between experience and experience mediated by a conscious composer. My discipline is about that conscious composer and the conscious composition comes from a place that values vulnerability and values the unknown and lets me delve into that approach.

I wanted to ensure that the movement doesn’t come from an aggressive place. I want to ensure that I’m not trying to sell my goods to the witness. To stay in contact with my own in limitations, my own investigation. And how that exchange grounds or locates the witness and me in the present moment.

8MS: So much of our culture is about hiding our vulnerability, using our aggressiveness to hide that vulnerability. Was this something you set out to do? Or did you discover this as you developed the project?

MS: In the early experiments I started to notice that I was more excited, that I had more intuitive inspiration when I had less of a sense of cockiness, or self assurance, about what I was doing. And it wasn’t that I was fumbling but that I had more agility with my whole self-instrument and with the expertise that I have. I was curious to say yes to that and to embrace it. To be curious by being transparent or pursuing a personal transparency in performance. To see if that might not be provide me more avenues to use my expertise and also to achieve a communication with the audience. Both of those have played out.

What I find, especially now a couple of years later, preparing to perform this piece in a more formal setting, there’s a habit, a particularly human habit to kind of trump up your confidence. Be self convincing that you know what you’re doing, that you know what you’re talking about. It’s a really attractive trait. It’s a really attractive process to be self-encouraging.

What I found was that over and over again in this project was that self-encouragement was clearing away of some of my senses. It’s not confidence as much as it’s an ego need to prove that I know what’s what. That I know what’s happening in my domain, whatever that domain might be.

That’s not the most productive way for me to be a mover. From a biochemical view, or a physical view, it makes logical sense. If you think about a cello, if that cello was contracted because of the cold, or the strings were pulled too tight, the cello would not have that play that the musician would need to make that instrument expressive. The body is the same way. When we go into that place of cockiness or proving one’s self, or in reducing what we understand, instead of staying curious we stay comfortable with the answers that we already have, and in reducing the vast chaos into a set of answers, the muscular availability is minimized.

When that happens, the body, like a cello, can’t respond. The body can’t respond spontaneously. They go hand in hand, this vulnerability and spontaneous composition. Without the vulnerability, the composition would be reductive.

8MS: How did the different composers affect the final work?

MS: I created these three boxes that are filled with images and words and poems and bits and pieces of things that were meant to provide a catalyst to the composer for them to respond to differently but to start with the same sort of provoking agent. I gave each of the composers one of these boxes.

I wanted to get away from the traditional process of sitting down to talk about what we were doing. I gave them each one of these boxes and I knew that they would each have their own experience. Creating the box was my role in letting them know where the piece was coming from for me but that I knew I wasn’t going to get in their faces at all about what they made. I wanted to give each of them permission to have a free association with the box and with what they made. What happened is each of them and each song has created a different environment and each proposes a mood. I have the option to either uphold or create some tension with that mood.

All the scores, to varying degrees, have an open quality to them, almost an unfinished quality. For me they have a really genereous unfinished quality, now maybe that’s just me because I know my role is to finish them. I know that I’m going to play with what they’ve done. When I’m performing I hear different things in them. Sometimes I hear things that seem to go on and other times those same parts seem to fly by. The personality of the composers is there in the compositions but I also feel there’s a softening of ego in the compositions as well. I really appreciate that quality because it’s not easy to make something for someone else. Especially something that doesn’t have a real surge of ego. They honored that value.

Photo: Sandbox Studio, Chicago