ABOUT

Shua Group is performance group based in Detroit Michigan. We create performances through dance, movement, voice, and light.   Our works are often immersive and interactive; they are sensorial, immediate, and designed.  They get at universal and contemporary questions and shared experiences.  They open a space to experience our shared humanity in an increasingly dissonant world.

We also teach, offering workshops release based dance, organic movement, contact and the interactions of voice and movement.

Shua Group has been widely presented by theater and visual arts spaces in the New York City, Detroit, and in 15 countries.  They are co-founders and directors of Andy Arts, Detroit.

Some of the things we do can be imported to theatre or gallery spaces including our current theatre work and immersive pieces Soft Wall and Poolastic. Other projects are developed though unique relationships with places or groups of people. Each work encourages deepening of perception, empathy with bodies and voices, re conception of place and identity, interaction with and transformation of the body, the public and our environment. Our works also offer frames for sudden audience action, breaking of spatial boundaries and a shifting of audience/artist roles. 

They go for a situation of radical presence.

This openness to presence is also reflected in our teaching which encourages an understanding of the context we all share: our body in relation to gravity, attraction and momentum. Our teaching is related broadly to the practices of releasing and sensory tuning learned through study in NYC with Daniel Lepkoff, Elaine Summers (Kinetic Awareness), Carl Anderson (Skinner Releasing) and Barbara Mahler (Klein Technique) and ongoing study of the Feldenkrise Method.

Since moving our practice to Detroit from New York/New Jersey in 2016 our relation to spoken word and street dance culture has opened new voice and movement practices.   Ongoing research with multi-disciplinary artist and poet Billy Mark has allowed for a new depth of language experience while moving. Trishawana Woods joined Shua Group in 2022 and integrated street dance languages into our physical vocabulary.  Through Detroit street dance culture we have met another form of powerful movement research and improvisation.

We seek to play a part in the evolution of movement and performance culture by a constant process of opening to new relationships, daily practice, and experimentation.

Joshua Bisset