VIM VIGOR Contemporary Floorwork Practice with Shannon Gillen

Let’s get into it: complex action igniting adaptive resilience.

Together, we’ll explore our personal movement architecture through contemporary movement practices and floorwork’s curvilinear pathways. We begin by generating heat through lush bodyweight conditioning and grounding exercises that open the fluid, transitional space between vertical and horizontal movement.

From there, we move into sequences that explore the body’s natural stealth, alongside sequential, spine-focused exercises drawing from Fighting Monkey practices of stabilization and joint optimization through contrasting directional forces and curvilinear motion, as well as Bartenieff Fundamentals’ emphasis on breath and developmental patterning.

We then dive into complex movement sequences that demand whole-body coordination, challenging each participant to recalibrate assumed strengths and weaknesses and discover new, playful modes of exploration and spontaneous, instinctual adaptation. Success and failure become material for sensory and communal feedback—structures that cultivate resilience, curiosity, and a deeper awareness of how we learn through movement.

This practice extends beyond the singular agency of choosing for oneself into a shared understanding of the studio environment: how are the choices of our peers in conversation with our own practice? How does collective movement expand, disrupt, or redirect our individual instincts?

Emphasizing strength, stamina, and artistry, the class builds toward complex phrasework drawn from Gillen’s latest choreographic research. Traversing surprising and challenging landscapes of size, direction, tone, and texture, each artist is invited to reset the perceived limits of their physical capacity.

Sweat, surprise, and full-bodied ardor await.

Shannon Gillen is the artistic director of VIM VIGOR (US). Her creative work has been commissioned across the USA, Canada, Central America, South America and Europe. Projects include commissions by L.A. Dance Project, dance.films for BAM, NY Fashion Week, Danceworks at the Lobero Theatre, Gibney Dance Company, Zagreb Dance Company, Hubbard Street 2, Resilience Dance, over het lj in (NL), Jacob’s Pillow Festival, Boston Dance Theater at the ICA in Boston, Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, b12 Festival at dock 11, (DE) Ruvuelo (Chile), Mainfranken Theater Würzburg (DE), Arts Umbrella (CA), the International Solo-Tanz Theater Festival in Stuttgart (DE), the TIF theater in Kassel (DE), de dansers (NL), as a think big choreographer-in-residence at Staatsoper Hannover (DE) and at Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton where she was a choreographer in residence; notable festivals and venues where her work has been seen include Springboard Danse festival in Montreal, New York Live Arts, Prisma Festival in Panama, Judson Church, PULSE art fair/Art Basel, Bryant Park, NYC’s River to River festival, Perry Mansfield, and The Joyce. Gillen’s recent commissions include the IUA in Reykjavik, Iceland, the b12 Festival in Berlin, the Institute of the Arts Barcelona (ES), Michigan Movement Performance Projects (M2P2), Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center for Gibney Presents in NYC, and the Arthur Miller Theatre (USA). Recently she created new works for choreographic platforms: LUZ / SITGES in Spain and MAVERICKS for b12 in Berlin. This Fall, she was commissioned by Zagreb Dance Company in Croatia to create a new work that will premiere at Zagreb Dance Center before touring in Europe. In 2027, Gillen will create new works for The University of Limerick in Ireland, Elon University, IAB in Spain, and for the Power Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Gillen is an Associate Professor of Dance at U-M. She is a graduate of The Juilliard School and earned her MFA from Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.