On Monday night, October 22, Molly Shanahan and the Mad Shak dance company created an on-stage conversation about identity and the human body in a challenging and unprecedented dance performance, entitled “Of Whales, Time, and Your Last Attempt to Reach Me.” With attention to individual movements, the group’s synergy, breath and words, Mad Shak allowed the audience to ponder what it means to have a human body with skin, muscles and bones. The group has been performing since 1994 and has established itself in the world of contemporary dance.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” first-year student Makenna Amondson remarked. “It was raw, the human form doing what it can do … but not human at the same time.” There was a tension in the performance between the fluidity of dance and the imperfections of the human body.

This tension was purposeful, as Shanahan explained in the Q&A session after the performance. The performance was about “wanting to be seen and wanting to hide” with specific regard to one’s body. The end of the performance was the overlap of each dancer repeating the words “this is my real, this is my fake.” According to Shanahan, this refrain comes from the desire to take up less space and retreat into one’s own skin. This forthright portrayal of body image is something that sets Mad Shak apart.

Cassandra Vander Well, a professor of kinesiology, expressed that she invited Mad Shak to come to Calvin because she was “excited about bringing a company that would be able to challenge the Calvin community’s expectation of what dance should be.” They display a side of movement that is “raw, vulnerable and messy” when the common expectation is for dance to be aesthetically beautiful.

There was some confusion in the audience because of that aspect of nonconformity, but the company’s explanation of their thought process allowed for more clarity. Shanahan shared that the experience that inspired her train of thought about the human body was watching her mother near the end of her life. Shanahan writes that she saw “an exquisite beauty that devastated me in its fragility and fraughtness” in her mother’s loss of physical control.

The group’s use of space, time and sound all had significance in their performance. When asked about choreography by an audience member, Shanahan explained that their performance was both carefully choreographed and included improvisation. Shanahan would often “create a mode” to work with, and each dancer would “create within that mode.” The performance alternated between times when each person danced individually and times when they danced in synchronization.

Spoken word was also used in this way: each person spoke individual words, and there were times when they all spoke together. The themes of the performance were enhanced by the group’s stylistic choices, and it left the audience with much to ponder. Shanahan hoped that this would be a performance that would sit in the audience’s mind throughout the week. When asked if she had any questions for the audience, Shanahan expressed,“I want to know what you think about it on Friday.”