Shannon Woods (MA '19)
At the most recent Dance Studies Association Conference in June 2025, PS alum Shannon Woods (MA ’19) was awarded the prestigious Gertrude Lippincott Award for her article, “The Threat Is Now: Choreography, Temporality, and the Active Shooter Drill,” published in Theatre Journal (Vol. 76, No. 3). This annual award recognizes the best English-language article in the field of dance studies for its excellence and impact on dance scholarship.
In this timely and urgent piece, Woods offers an examination of the intersection between choreography, the police state, and the growing cultural phenomenon of active shooter drills in U.S. schools. She introduces the concept of “performances of protection”—embodied, scripted routines designed to mitigate risk and rehearse for crisis. Through movement analysis and fieldwork conducted at training programs, she demonstrates how these rehearsals discipline the body, normalize fear, and further entrench policing as the primary mode of safety and social control. Among the article’s many contributions is its innovative theorization of active shooter drills and their choreographies as structuring time according to carceral logics. Woods argues that drills do more than train students and teachers for emergencies—they choreograph an entire temporal framework of constant readiness, in which time becomes both a commodity and a threat. She shows how law enforcement agencies and the school safety industry harness time to measure efficiency and instill docility, creating a population perpetually rehearsing for an event that is “always already happening.”
Woods began this research while a master’s student in NYU Performance Studies and continued developing it throughout her doctoral dissertation work at the University of Texas at Austin, which she completed this past spring.