Still from an early work-in-progress performance of “can you enjoy yourself?” created for the Headlong 2018 final, “critically kind: a performance experiment in being nice” presented at Christ Neighborhood Church
about
Madeline Shuron (they/she) holds an MFA in dance from Temple University, where she serves as an adjunct, and works as a movement teacher at a Montessori school in the city. As an artist and educator based in Philadelphia, she is interested in investigating embodied affect and interrogating the audience-performer relationship through an interdisciplinary approach of dance, theater, film, puppetry, and clowning. Their scholarship blends film, literature, educational pedagogy practices, and performance studies into a delicious mix of joy and play. Madeline’s work (both artistically and scholarly) has been witnessed at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Temple University, Bryn Mawr College, Dance Studies Association, the Lawrence Art Center (KS), Random Access Gallery (NY), and Post45:Contemporaries; she has given lecture-demonstrations at University of North Carolina at Asheville, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the American College Dance Association’s 50th Anniversary Conference. Madeline is the recipient of several awards, including a Fulbright scholarship to conduct dance research in Berlin.
artistic statement
I am a dramaturg and choreographer who makes work that straddles the line between dance and theater. I use text, film, puppetry, and gestures to create intimate, convoluted worlds; in my art, I attempt to interrogate the relationship between the audience and the performer, and the intimacy it requires to keep up that relationship. My work comes from theories of queer affect, literary theory, and performance studies in the quotidian world. What guides my work is questions and curiosity: I’m not looking for answers, but instead, more questions to bring me further into my process.
My work is the feeling of holding three hundred balloons in your fist; each string shifting and caressing across your palm, the frantic feeling of trying to hold them all tightly enough to not slip free. My work refracts and reflects the self in all the multifaceted ways we exist. If you are alive right now, you have been practicing self-defense. Spill your guts.
