Cookie Harrist (Fundamentals Class)
Class Description: "Meditation in Contact"
Cookie's "Meditation in Contact" class offers beginners and more advanced practitioners the opportunity to play with state work within their contact practice. Cookie invites participants to let go of prescribed pathways and instead pour themselves into the moment-to-moment act of following what is already occurring. We will take stock of what we tell ourselves as we dance: are your thoughts helpful, inventive, confining, disruptive? We will investigate multiple points of focus and frames of mind to see how each meditation alters the dance. Cookie works in the present state in order to crack open the dance and allow for new ways of relating to occur.
Biography:
Cookie Harrist is a dance artist who recently relocated to San Francisco from rural Denmark, Maine. Cookie began her study of contact improvisation in 2010 under Kristin Horrigan at Marlboro College in Vermont. Since then, she has deepened her practice of the form through study with Sara Shelton Mann, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Chris Aiken and many others. During her time in Maine, Cookie was a prominent teacher in the Portland contact community, as well as a regular guest teacher at Colby and Bates Colleges. Cookie has performed in works by Sara Shelton Mann, NAKA Dance Theater (Jose Navarrete and Debby Kajiyama), Hana van der Kolk, Asher Woodworth, and Sam Stone, among others. In July 2018, Cookie will be seen in Joe Goode Performance Group's newest work, "Standing Still." Cookie's own choreographic work has been presented at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (as part of the 2012 National College Dance Festival), AUNTS, SALTA/ Fresh Festival, 3S Artspace, Bates College and Colby College, among others.