Heartshakes

My name is Shannon Murphy. I am a dance artist, and educator living on Lenape land, currently known as Philadelphia. I am working in collaboration with artists maris, Brandon Graff, Beau Hancock, mik philips, Kayla Ricketts, kira shina, Steve Surgalski, Michele Tantoco, Sara Yassky to share my latest work, Heartshakes.

Heartshakes is a performative practice that emerged from the intersection of anatomic and movement research. Dance, original sound scores, puppetry, and poetry help us ask how sensing our internal rhythms may bring us into relationships with others, no matter the distance. If you have seen my work before, you know I love the energy and collective creative illumination that happens when many people collaborate. This team is formed of half recent UArts Alumni (where I have been on faculty for 10 years) and half artists that I have a deep history making dances with - really, almost 20 years!! Rehearsals are hot and sweaty! We find boldness in our choices as improvisers and refine the pathways in which story and dance can open up to fantasy, mythmaking, and messiness.

This work is partly supported by an Artist in Residence at the University of the Arts and my personal financing. I am contacting our community looking for investors to help support this last leg of rehearsals, puppet making, costuming, and technical needs. Every donation helps!

There are many ways to support our work. Please consider donating today, pre-order your ticket to Heartshakes in Cannonball Fest at the 2023 Fringe Festival, and most importantly, spread the word! Honestly, the most help we could ask for is to tell your friends, co-workers, and extended communities about our work and encourage them to check us out!

Heartshakes is part of Cannonball Festival - www.cannonballfestival.org

Location: The Icebox Project Space

1400 N American St, Philadelphia, PA, 19122

Tickets are $25.00, (There are reserved tickets at each show that are sliding scale starting at $5)

9/1/2023 Showtime: 8:00 pm, 1hr

9/7/2023 Showtime: 8:00 pm, 1hr

9/17/2023 Showtime: 2:00 pm, 1hr

More about Heartshakes:

Heartshakes has been culminating over the last few years. It is a work that demands that my pedagogical, anatomical, and creative research not be considered separate. Allowing these different areas of my life and work to weave together, I could play, take risks, and shake up my process. As a professor, I cultivate movement studies as an attentive practice of considering how bodymind/somatically informed practices complicate notions of body, health, and (de)colonization. We do this by exploring visceral anatomy, interoception, and naming the lineages of understanding that we each bring into the classroom. One area focuses on the heart, vessels, and blood. Dancing with a sense of the heart's motility brings a specific quality to my movement and tone in my writing, daydreaming, and composition.

This year, I attended my first integrative anatomy dissection lab at the Institute of Anatomical Research in Colorado Springs, the home for GIl Headly's teaching and research. I left with more questions than answers. I set out to learn more about the mediastinum to deepen my understanding of the liminal space surrounding the heart. However, I could not hold it or see how it integrated into the pericardium or pleura, nor how it might support, communicate, and expand the in-between. Instead, I found a mess - facial goo. So naturally, the next step was to bring my questions back into the studio. Dance allows me to take the research further. I push on the unknown, sensing the messiness and the myths.

I ask, "What are the fantastic experiences of the mediastinum?" Heartshakes uses state of being, meditative, and dreamlike states to harvest text, character, and movement. The turn of phrase "I Know it by heart" becomes a playful way to see the heart as a communicator with stories to share. Multiple forms of literacy are always present, as we may understand more than we can ever know. How can we find one another? What maps would we need? I started with a mapping practice of the heart, drawing atriums - gathering spaces - and imagining the trillions of possible pathways in which we circulate. I believe in an extended circulation that brings us into an encounter with endlessness, soil, and the cosmos. My work proposes that the vascular system extends out into our external environment. This led to the creation of large puppets that have become guardians of the entryways - the portals. They tend to the intervals between what we shout and what echoes back to us. They guide us through the transitional spaces between love and grief, life and death. The dancers and musicians work to illuminate the endless waves that fill the gaps that exist between the concrete. We perform Heartshakes, moments that shake us back into sensation.